Avatar Identicon by Iversia

Avatar Identicon by Iversia 1.2.2

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Iversia

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Iversia submitted a new resource:

[Iversia] Identicon - Replaces XenForo's default avatars with Gravatar's Identicons

An Identicon is a visual representation of a hash value, usually of an IP address, that serves to identify a user of a computer system as a form of avatar while protecting the users' privacy. The original Identicon was a 9-block graphic, and the representation has been extended to other graphic forms by third parties. - Wikipedia

This add-on is untested and is currently not recommended for production use....

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Awesome that this is on XF now, but with the concerns of large forums, I was bugging around and found something that wordpress uses:
http://scott.sherrillmix.com/blog/blogger/wp_identicon/
I mean it's probably not much of a better solution, but it's something, right?
Could be. That's actually the original code that Gravatar (WordPress/Automattic) used to generate their Identicons. They just turned it into a service instead of a self-contained package. :)

That said, I'm not sure how bad performance issues with this current setup are. It might actually be alright. More testing is certainly needed though. I haven't had the time to do any proper benchmarking. Gravatar has also improved as a service over the years too, so there might not be any performance issues at all. Hard to say.

Edit: Performance issues are actually looking to be fairly minimal. While it's extra HTTP requests, Gravatar really has gotten better. They've been serving over 100,000 requests per second, with most requests loading in under 100 milliseconds. Pretty impressive.
 
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@Iversia I'm loving this little add-on. It got so dull seeing people join and sticking to that default. Adding this also has given my members a little bit of humour in what some people ended up (a little bit of an ironic feeling for others).

Keep up the good work :)
 
What I've learned is that utilizing Gravatar for anything can be a potential issue for some sites.

In my case, some users were experiencing delays in page load. It appeared to affect only certain users, likely due their proximity to Gravatar's servers. I use this plugin with the Retro avatars selected. Users like it, and it results in a clean presentation of posts.

My solution to resolving the occasional page-load delays involves modification of Iversia's plugin, and some creative work with my CDN. This solved the performance issues of those that were affected, but it isn't secure.

Would it be possible for a future version your plugin to copy the avatar image from Gravatar down to the local Xenforo data directory? I think that would be much better than a call to Gravatar everytime.

The size of these images, and resulting traffic from my CDN, has been amazingly small. Copying the gravatar images down to my server wouldn't take significant space.
 
I'll look into it, @motowebmaster. It shouldn't be too difficult. For most sites, loading directly from Gravatar should be sufficient. However I can totally understand wanting this from a security perspective. :)
 
What a great way to liven up the appearance of my forum - thanks!

Small problem - I'm using Waindigo's "Last post avatar" and the two add-ons don't appear to talk to each other. It gives the same icon for every "last poster", regardless of who they are.

Do you have any ideas if this might be a quick fix, please?

Thank you!
 
Update: Hey, it's not working. It appears that the cause is the icons have a www in the URL and the images only load without the www, otherwise they get an HTTPS certificate error.
 
Update: Hey, it's not working. It appears that the cause is the icons have a www in the URL and the images only load without the www, otherwise they get an HTTPS certificate error.
I'll update it to force the HTTPS option. I don't currently have a board that is set up with SSL, so that slipped right by me.
 
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