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.

rtCamp

Pradeep Sonawane

Gmail Like Gravatar Fallback plugin converts default WordPress Gravatar into Gmail App like Gravatar which shows the initial letter of the user in a random background color.
<ul>
<li>You can also add your styling to your stylesheet to customize the default gravatar after activating the plugin. Once the plugin is installed, it detects the user gravatars which are not set and are default, then they will be converted to SQUARE ICONS with First Letter of User’s Name.</li>
<li>This plugin also keeps the default gravatar settings, so once plugin is deactivated, old setting will be applied again.</li>
<li>This will show Gmail APP like gravatars in Comments list and Users / Members list.</li>
<li>This plugin has no settings, it just uses converts the default Gravatars using jQuery.</li>
</ul>
Requirements: 
1. In the HTML markup, the Author Name should be sibling of Author Gravatar. 
2. The Author name should have “fn” class. <a href="http://impradeep.in/gmail-like-gravatar-fallback-wordpress-plugin" rel="nofollow ugc"></a>To know more click here…
Please note: Our default WordPress comments section already shows markup in the link above. 
So if want to use these Gmail like Gravatar Fallback in some other custom templates, then you can reform the structure to look like the above.

Gmail Like Gravatar Fallback

Gmail Like Gravatar Fallback plugin converts default Gravatar into Gmail App like Gravatar.

Mirror Gravatar vs Gmail Like Gravatar Fallback