For a long time we have had small avatars on SUMO, but with the shiny new profile pages they look out of place. So we are going to support bigger avatars soon. But there is a twist: We won’t just increase the size of the avatars, we are switching to Gravatar instead. Gravatar is used by large number of online services including mozillians.org. This means that you don’t have to manage your avatar on SUMO separately unless you really want to. You can just upload an image once on Gravatar and have it show up on all kinds of webservices you are using.
Now, what does this change mean for you?
- If you are a new user and have a Gravatar account already, we’ll automatically use that when you create a new account on SUMO
- If you are a new user and don’t have a Gravatar account yet, you’ll get the default avatar as always and you can change your Avatar by going to the Gravatar page (linked from your profile on SUMO)
- If you are an existing user with a Gravatar account, we’ll replace the avatar you have here with the one in your Gravatar account.
- If you are an existing user without a Gravatar account nothing is changing for you. But if you want to change your Avatar later on, you’ll be linked to Gravatar.
If you don’t want your standard Gravatar image to be shown on SUMO, you can change your email address on SUMO. You don’t have to actually use a different email account. Just append “+SUMO” to it. So if my mail address is atopal@example.com it would become atopal+SUMO@example.com. This way you still get your email to atopal@example.com, but Gravatar won’t show the image here that you have set for atopal@example.com
This is now live on our staging server: http://support.allizom.org Please give it a try and let me know what you think. You can also comment directly in the bug for this: https://bugzilla.mozilla.org/show_bug.cgi?id=918854