Service Issue What's up with gravatar

Mike,

You're right (and I didn't point it out after my "experiments"): I can paste in a URL, bypassing XF entirely and still retrieve a stale Gravatar.

What puzzles me the most is where the image is being cached. Why can I always pull up a fresh Gravatar if I use the simple URL to the JPG file, yet get a stale Gravatar if I use that URL with the extra options added to it? Or to put it another way, what is it about the longer URL that Gravatar does not like that is making it fetch stale Gravatars?

If you think about the nature of Gravatars, and how they could change on moment's notice, it almost makes sense for them not to cache the Gravatars, or at least have a shorter timeout of 12 or 24 hours so they update in a timely fashion. But, whatever is "stuck" in their system made it serve up Gravatars that are almost two months old.

One solution that may work and save bandwidth: use a timestamped URL in the avatar editor only. I noticed that once I "woke up" their system by manually inserting a timestamp in the Gravatar's image URL in the browser's address bar (copied and pasted from the "developer" window in Chrome), the Gravatar then started working normally throughout the forum using the standard XF-generated URL.

The forums I have don't generate enough traffic that I'm worried about bandwidth, but I would not try it on a busy "big board" like the one I'm considering switching over to XF. In that case, I would simply disable it...or would enable it with the warning that it may not update Gravatars in a timely manner.