CUNY Academic Commons

Avatar images 150x150 jpgs are shared in this google drive folder: https://drive.google.com/drive/folders/1izn1V4-kUz2OPlJw4t9FWvwE-E2Dxu0p?usp=sharing

I'll try to get this implemented in the upcoming days so that the team can decide whether the all-blue scheme is a good one.

I've already implemented this for user avatars :)

Check cdev for the change. Code is in wp-content/plugins/bp-custom.php. Haven't committed it yet. For the hash, I'm using crc32() on the email address and using the modulus of the numeric hash to get the random number from 1 to 5 to be used for the default avatar.

I had to upload the default avatar images to production at /blogs.dir/1/files/avatars/random/ so Gravatar could pick it up for display on cdev.

To be honest, the blues look fine to me. Happy to hear objections from those who don't agree!

Ray, quick follow-up that I had to commit your change in order to merge with some other stuff.

I assume we're going to use the same defaults for groups and sites as well, correct?

Yeah, I wasn't sure what we wanted to do here. I assumed the opposite as I think groups and sites should have a different style since they are different objects.

To be honest, the blues look fine to me. Happy to hear objections from those who don't agree!

Looking at the screenshots a bit, I feel the two hues of blue used for the line and background are too similar. Perhaps we can either darken the line or lighten the background so there is a bit more contrast?

(Side note: I removed two screenshots that were not related to this ticket and meant for #13998 here .)

I agree with Ray that we might want to consider a different color or treatment for groups and sites. Is it too straightforward to consider an orange and a green in the canonical Commons color scheme, one each for groups and sites? I think the lines look ok generally, but I'm open to other contrast as Ray mentioned.

I think we definitely need to do something for groups and sites. The gravatar defaults don't fit the theme.

I'm sensitive to Sara's line of reasoning here. The purpose of avatars is to assist users in scanning lists and conversations. If the defaults are all the same, they become useless for this purpose. And having users all default to blue while sites default to orange (for example) doesn't help this. I'd be in favor of having 3-5 visually distinct defaults, and have all items (groups, sites, users) pull from this default set.

I've updated cdev so groups and sites use the new default avatar set: https://github.com/cuny-academic-commons/cac/commit/08ed2e5611e0e98ca9090b1dc19a9b070080a4ed.

For members, the new image set may not be ready for some users due to Gravatar caching: https://meta.stackexchange.com/a/139673. So if you're seeing an older avatar, check back in an hour or so and hopefully Gravatar's CDN is updated by then.

Seeing these new avatars in practice, I think they strike the perfect balance between variability and subtlety.

I heartily agree. Beautiful work, Sara!!!!