Gravatar images empty
I just noticed that when users are signing in by creating a email / password account, the image URL is a gravatar URL, i.e. https://gravatar.com/avatar/somelongid?d=blank&size=200
But the image is blank. I know Gratavar images were coming soon, so maybe there's a bug here.
13 Replies
Hey @ryno1234.,
We recently made changes to our user identity management, whereby if a user authenticates with email, and a Gravatar profile exists assoiciated with the email, the user's picture/image would be populated from the Gravatar profile.
Regarding your users who now have an image with a gravatar URL
1. Do they have an email with an associated Gravatar profile?
2. Did any of those users have a different picture/image that is now overridden with the Gravatar URL?
I know you mentioned username/password, but I know you have email authentication so I mentioned email above.
@Oli - Kinde , my mistake. I accidentally said username / password. I've corrected my original inquiry - I mean email / password.
To answer your questions:
1) I'm not sure if they have a gravatar profile, but based on the fact that I'm seeing no images, I'm guessing not. Here is a concrete example of a URL (https://gravatar.com/avatar/ecd21a05fda223577d25f592e54d2d1ebcd928ebe0ccfb552f1627bb4e1753dd?d=blank&size=200)
2) I also couldn't tell you because I don't keep a historical record of what their photo was. The way our system works is we take whatever photo URL comes to us at login time. This means if a user has 1 email / password "account" but has logged in to that account via Facebook, Email / Password and Gmail, all with different photos, we update their account photo within our system using whatever the latest photo is given the method they signed in. As I mentioned, we don't track the photo for each method, just a single photo using the latest information available.
Thanks!
Thanks @ryno1234. for getting back to me and correcting your original message with email / password.
Thanks for sending over an email of the Gravatar URL.
This definitely doesn't sound like the ideal experience.
I was speaking to my team last week about the Gravatar picture URL functionality, and I will be speaking to my team next week about this issue you are experiencing.
I am sure we can make it better.
I will get back to you once I have more information.
Hey @ryno1234.,
Are you still experiencing this issue?
Yes. I still am. Here is a screenshot of our application that displays the user's profile image
You can see [email protected] has no image displayed. There is in fact an image there, it's just blank (transparent PNG maybe? I haven't researched). When looking at the URL of that image, its similar to the one I mentioned above
I see. That is not ideal.
Let's also discuss this during our call tomorrow.
I'm also experiencing this issue. Is there anything that can be discussed to rectify this? If not I might turn off the Gravatar feature
Hey @TotalScrub,
Are you able to explain more details about the issue you are experiencing, including your current state and expected state?
@Oli - Kinde it's the same as what ryno1234 experienced. Kinde is generating gravatar URLs and sending these across in the picture claim, but they are just transparent images. It isn't a big deal for me. I'm not familiar with Gravatar but I assumed as a nice to have if the user doesn't have an avatar that comes across to Kinde (e.g. using username / password) that Gravatar would generate an avatar that could at least be used temporarily (e.g. an image with the initials of their name) so that could be shown as their avatar.
For now, I'm ignoring any Gravatar URLs and I'm just using a generic icon if the user doesn't have an avatar.
Hey @TotalScrub,
Thanks for elaborating on your issue and expected case.
We are actually exploring how to improve our gravatar implementation at the moment.
I think your suggestion of passing an avatar, e.g. an image with the initials, is a good fallback option.
I have passed this to my team.
Sounds like the current Gravatar implementation is not a blocking issue for you at the moment since you are ignoring the Gravatar URLs.
Please do reach out again if you come across a burning issue with Grvatars or anything else.
@Stephen, for what it's worth, this was our solution to it (relevant code below). We essentially take the Gravitar URL as provided by Kinde, changed out the parameter on the URL which returns a "blank" image to instead return a 404 when no image exists. We use this 404 response to then do our fallback routine to create our own internal profile images utilizing www.ui-avatars.com
Here are options for the fallback
404: do not load any image if none is associated with the email hash, instead return an HTTP 404 (File Not Found) response
mp: (mystery-person) a simple, cartoon-style silhouetted outline of a person (does not vary by email hash)
identicon: a geometric pattern based on an email hash
monsterid: a generated ‘monster’ with different colors, faces, etc
wavatar: generated faces with differing features and backgrounds
retro: awesome generated, 8-bit arcade-style pixelated faces
robohash: a generated robot with different colors, faces, etc
blank: a transparent PNG image (border added to HTML below for demonstration purposes)
Thanks @ryno1234. I might do something similar along those lines, but for now I'm just getting my API to return
null for Gravatar icons coming from Kinde and displaying a generic Icon. Hey, maybe if it's boring enough maybe people will upload their avatars 😁.