Gravatars Update
Thanks to everybody who provided feedback on the avatars, and who helped us iron out bugs in the gravatar implementation. Special thanks to Stormraider and Meteora, both of whom solved the problems of gravatars not appearing at all for some people, even after hours of waiting.
If you were one of the users who had set up a gravatar account early in the day and had not seen your avatar appear on HG, it should appear now. This was the bug where if your email address wasn’t public, your gravatar didn’t show. Since admins and moderators have access to your email address, by default, they could see your avatar just fine, creating many moments of confusion and frustration in the forums. So, thanks again to Meteora for finding the cause of the problem.
The other bug was that if the HG account’s email address had capitals letter in it, the gravatar didn’t show. This was luckily fixed early in the day after Stormraider pointed it out to me.
Lastly, based on feedback, we’ve raised the size of the avatars to 40 pixels from 30. It is unlikely it will get any larger soon. If you want your avatar to look great though, the folks at Gravatar suggested uploading a picture that’s around 512×512 pixels in size. As with many things in life, keep your avatar simple so it’s easier to see what it is, especially when it’s shrink down to 40 pixels.
If you don’t like avatars at all, you can always turn it off in your user preferences page.
Hope you’ve enjoyed this update, and we hope to have many more in the future.
-Zen