Gravatar Support

[rebelsheart]

Title
Gravatar Support

Short, concise description of the idea
Setup support for Gravatars in commenting, notably for OpenID users.

Full description of the ideaA gravatar is a "globally recognized avatar", as is explained on their website at http://www.gravatar.com. A user creates an account

Comments

[mskala]

What happens if someone uses a picture of a woman breastfeeding? I'm not just trying to stir up trouble by mentioning that; the thing is that that or something like it will happen, and when it does happen, Livejournal won't be able to touch it because the image hosting is out of their hands. Allowing "gravatars" or any other off-site-hosted user icons, means giving up the currently-claimed ability to make rules about icon content.

Furthermore, Livejournal has a history of using user-icon features as paid-only benefits. This particular suggestion isn't really asking for much, but it's a user-icon feature that would be available not only for free but even to non-LJ accounts, and I suspect Livejournal might think it would dilute the value of paid accounts, and might refuse to support it for that reason.

[sleepfighter]

As I understand the suggestion as written, wouldn't this feature only be available mostly to to OpenID accounts? I'm curious as to how exactly this dilutes the value of paid accounts in that case.

[mskala]

I did not say that this makes sense - I don't agree with Livejournal's position on this kind of thing - but I think their point of view would be that if you can get a controllable icon without getting a paid account, then that's one less reason to get a paid account. Evidence that Livejournal would react this way is in their reactions to many other suggestions relating to user icons. Anything that would expand non-paid users' control over user icons, is categorically rejected.

[azurelunatic]

Gravatar allows their users to set a rating for their icons. (And, fyi, new LJ management allowed as how breastfeeding shouldn't be considered in the same category as adult-rated stuff, quite some time ago.) So LJ would, for default icon purposes, have to not pull an R or X-rated icon from the gravatar site.

http://en.gravatar.com/site/implement/url

Step 4, The rating: You can specify a "rating" or "r" parameter to the URL of g, pg, r, or x. If you omit this step we use a default rating of g.

http://www.gravatar.com/avatar/3b3be63a4c2a439b013787725dfce802?r=g

My guess is that having a userpic hosted offsite would potentially pose more of a barrier than rating/payment.

[mooism]

Gravatar is a proprietary centralised system. I'd rather there was a way for LJ to grab an icon from the openid page.

[azurelunatic]

Gravatar wants to work with LJ, I see: http://en.gravatar.com/site/implement/livejournal

[azurelunatic]

Hm

[azurelunatic]

And then there's the possibly-simpler way: like LJ is doing for Facebook, except the other way around.

Gravatar implements a way to enter one's LiveJournal on Gravatar's end. If a user on Gravatar's end has an LJ username *or* an OpenID entered and they say tick a box that says they want to sync with LJ, they are prompted (upon first setting it up and subsequently upon changing their pic) to be signed into LJ with Oauth or OpenID, and automatically upload the icon they just uploaded elsewhere, and setting it as default. So LJ would not have to play "are we there yet" and check Gravatar each time someone loads a comment from them, the icon would not be hosted on Gravatar, it would just be a really convenient way to sync icons.