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:
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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.
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You will be serving more (small) images.
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If a commenter’s URL looks like a link to a Mastodon / ActivityPub profile, their Mastodon account’s avatar will be displayed.
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When commenting, a live preview of the avatar tracks the contents of the “Email” field.
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<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.
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If someone changes or deletes their avatar, your site continues displaying the image that was their avatar at the time that they last posted.
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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.
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</ul>
<h3>Security and Privacy</h3>
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<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.
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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>.
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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.
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</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.

LOO2K

这是一个关于 Gravatar Cache 的重要更新，之前（2010.10.15） Gravatar 由于一些众所未知的原因不能访问，所以当初制作了一个 Gravatar 头像的本地缓存插件，但是由于当时编写的比较匆忙，遗留下了一些问题，包括但不限于：无法使用默认图片、无法缓存不同大小的头像等；
最近一段时间（2011.08.02），Gravatar 再次无法访问，所以重新写了一个插件 Gravatar China for WordPress，并解决的之前存在的所有已知的问题；
Gravatar China for WordPress 特性
<pre><code>* Gravatar 头像防墙补丁：替换 Gravatar 头像能正常访问的地址；
* Gravatar 本地缓存：对特殊的网络环境下给头像进行本地缓存；
* 自定义设置缓存过期时间；
* 国内、国外主机用户通用；
* 完美兼容 WordPress；
</code></pre>
Gravatar China for WordPress 说明
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本插件针对中国大陆的网络环境制作；
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一般情况下，你可以在 Gravatar 头像不能正常访问的时候启用本插件的 “Gravatar 补丁”，它能帮助你的 WordPress 访客连接到正常的头像地址上；
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通常，根据网页前端的性能优化来说，不推荐用户启用 “Gravatar 本地缓存”，因为它对 WordPress 的性能有一定的影响，当然这个影响仅限于生成本地缓存的时候；（启用缓存前请确认你的 WordPress 目录 wp-content/plugins/gravatar-cn/cache 可写）
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</ul>

Gravatar China

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Mirror Gravatar vs Gravatar China