Locally mirrors commenters’ Gravatar, Libravatar and Mastodon avatars and serves them from your site, rather than loading them from a third-party web site upon each page load.
This has several effects:
<ul>
<li>
If most of the comments on a post have no avatar, those turn into one load of a shared image, instead of one for each comment, that happens to return the same “mystery” image.
</li>
<li>
You will be serving more (small) images.
</li>
<li>
If a commenter’s URL looks like a link to a Mastodon / ActivityPub profile, their Mastodon account’s avatar will be displayed.
</li>
<li>
When commenting, a live preview of the avatar tracks the contents of the “Email” field.
</li>
<li>
<a href="https://www.gravatar.com/" rel="nofollow ugc">gravatar.com</a> and <a href="https://www.libravatar.org/" rel="nofollow ugc">libravatar.org</a> no longer have a web-bug on your blog that is loaded by each viewer. Instead of being loaded at every page view, the avatar is loaded just once, on the server-side, at the time each new comment is posted.
</li>
<li>
If someone changes or deletes their avatar, your site continues displaying the image that was their avatar at the time that they last posted.
</li>
<li>
Likewise, the user’s Gravatar or Mastodon profile is saved along with their comment, viewable by admins even if they later change or delete it.
</li>
</ul>
<h3>Security and Privacy</h3>
<ul>
<li>
<a href="https://www.libravatar.org/" rel="nofollow ugc">Libravatar</a> is open source. Gravatar is <a href="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Gravatar" rel="nofollow ugc">owned by WordPress</a>, and their <a href="https://automattic.com/privacy/" rel="nofollow ugc">privacy policy</a> says that they don’t monetize that info. But hey, corporate policies change, subpoenas exist, and domain names get sold.
</li>
<li>
Should you trust Gravatar with user data? Well, in 2024, Gravatar announced that they are <a href="https://jwz.org/b/ykXF" rel="nofollow ugc">pivoting to blockchain</a>, whatever that means, so that’s fairly disqualifying. See also <a href="https://jwz.org/b/ykPk" rel="nofollow ugc">WordPress “growth hacking”</a> and <a href="https://jwz.org/b/ykNg" rel="nofollow ugc">WordPress sells users’ data to train AI tools</a>.
</li>
<li>
There used to be a potential issue due to <a href="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Gravatar#Security_concerns_and_data_breaches" rel="nofollow ugc">Gravatars using MD5 hashes</a>, but these days they use SHA256, so I assume that’s no longer a problem.
</li>
</ul>

Mirror Gravatar


The plugin does just what it says and it's a great way to improve WordPress just a little bit.


Great plugin to make WordPress a bit better

Locally mirror commenters' Gravatar or Mastodon profile images.

ginoplusio

Are you bored by Identicons and MonsterId icons in your blog comments? 
This plugin will add new avatars for users that don’t have a Gravatar image setted, to use this choose the “blank” icon in your “Discussion settings” and use this plugin setting panel to choose your new avatar style. Avatars come from these 3rd party services: Flat Hash (from http://flathash.com/), Robot and monsters Hash (from https://robohash.org/) and Unicorns avatars (from https://unicornify.appspot.com/).

Better Gravatar generated icons

Bored by Identicon and MonsterId? Here is a way to add new automatic generated avatars, such as Flathash or Unicorns or funny robots

Mirror Gravatar vs Better Gravatar generated icons