Using Xenforo Avatars On Wordpress And Using Xenforo To Power Wordpress Comments

[Deepmartini]

Has anyone figured out an easy way to do this?

 

[Dominion]

I would probably go the easy route, disable uploading of avatars and just use Gravatars.

The Doctor's quotation of my earlier post actually misrepresented it a bit. I was expressing only lukewarm enthusiasm for the idea. On our site only staff members will have WP blogs, and they won't be changing their avatars very often, so manually updating both WP and XF won't be a problem.

As for the Gravatar solution, I'm not sure I'd want to do as you say. Basically I'd be saying to my forum users: "If you want to have a custom avatar on my site, you gotta give your email address to these other guys." I haven't decided if I want to allow Gravatar use as an option yet; I'm going to have to look into the service and make sure there are no security issues involved. But even assuming they're perfectly fine in that sense: requiring someone to reveal private information to a third party in order to take advantage of a feature of my site doesn't seem like a good thing to do.

 

[Digital Doctor]

I would have to reinvent the wheel and create a dozen or more modules just to come close to what I need to do with Wordpress

Could you give some examples ?
Maybe the top 5 things you'd need the most ?

 

[Wildcat Media]

Could you give some examples ?
Maybe the top 5 things you'd need the most ?

When I get more time, I could list several and why/how/where we use them...I'm under deadline right now on a project. Quickly, I have a grouping of over four dozen plugins that I copy over to each new WP installation I make, and I enable the ones we need (sometimes just a small handful, others may get a dozen or more). Some are more behind the scenes, where others show directly on the blog home page.

 

[Wildcat Media]

I haven't decided if I want to allow Gravatar use as an option yet; I'm going to have to look into the service and make sure there are no security issues involved. But even assuming they're perfectly fine in that sense: requiring someone to reveal private information to a third party in order to take advantage of a feature of my site doesn't seem like a good thing to do.

Gravatars in XF can tie into *any* email address, not your account address. A free email account would work just for Gravatar use. I'm not a big Gravatar fan, but lately with my "presence" scattered all over, I setup a separate email to use for my Gravatars. Also IIRC, Gravatar is not a login-based system to display avatars--only when you want to manage them.

Thing is, try explaining that to clueless, paranoid forum members...

 

[Dominion]

The lack of login is what concerns me. It sounds as though someone knowing the Gravatar address of User A (who has yet to register on my site) could conceivably use that info to create an account on my site and impersonate User A. Same name, same avatar; who'd know the difference?

I know, you don't need Gravatar to do this. What Gravatar would buy the impersonator is a dead simple to keep in sync with any avatar changes made by User A.

Maybe this could be avoided by giving Gravatar a separate email that isn't used for anything else. But that means that I'd be asking forum members to take two extra steps (create a new address & sign up with Gravatar) just so they can replace the default avatar with an image that's sitting on their desktop. I'm not sure I'd want to do that, especially if the users are paying subscription fees for premium membership.