CUNY Academic Commons

I remember that our choice of default avatar was affected by gravatar -- maybe in relation to this ticket ? Can't find the ticket I'm looking for....

Yeah -- good point and nice catch.

Gravatar offers the ability to show an auto-generated image for users who do not have locally uploaded avatars (or Gravatars). The image is generated based on a hash of the user's email address, which makes them unique and persistent on a per-user basis.

The problem we had with Gravatar in the past had to do with falling back on a local avatar. We had to disable it because it was causing issues with security policies on some GC lab computers. That's because we were sending a local address along with our Gravatar request that served as the fallback if no Gravatar was found, with the result that, on commons.gc.cuny.edu, gravatar.com was requesting a URL that was hosted on commons.gc.cuny.edu. This kind of cross-site embedding request is blocked for security reasons on GC lab computers. So, the blue default avatar is Gravatar's default fallback.

We could switch this out for one of Gravatar's auto-generated options. Check them out here: http://en.gravatar.com/site/implement/images/ (scroll down to the Default Image section - all but the Mystery Man are autogenerated based on email address).

Gravatar aside, I could probably also manage it locally, by choosing from among a number of preselected default avatars. That will take more work, and someone would need to provide these defaults. But it gives us more control.

I like Gravatar's retro default images and think they'd be a big improvement on what we have now. That's my vote.

I agree that some option which provides some variety in the default image would be better than what we have currently. In the short term we could do whichever option is simplest to implement.

In the longer term we can think about other options. One idea is to use the CUNY school logos. I know this would take more work though and we have a lot of stuff on the plate.