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.

Hikari Unicornified Gravatars converts avatars from people that don’t have a Gravatar, into customized unicorns.
Commenters that have their email registered in Gravatar service are kept with their original Gravatars. But people not registered in Gravatar, instead of having a default avatar that always look the same, are provided with a variety of unicorns avatars, that are related and specific to their email.
And those anonymous commenters that don’t provide any email, they receive randomized unicorns avatars, which change on every page load!!
That’s possible thanks to <a href="http://meta.stackoverflow.com/questions/37328/my-godits-full-of-unicorns" rel="nofollow ugc">StackOverflow</a>, which developed a Gravatar-compatible algorithm that generates <a href="http://blog.gravatar.com/2010/04/01/unicorn-gravatars-stack-overflow/" rel="nofollow ugc">unicorns avatars</a> in place of standard Gravatar ones.
I dedicate Hikari Unicornified Gravatars to Ju, my beloved frient ^-^
<h4>Features</h4>
<ul>
<li>Works instantly on any place where WordPress <code>get_avatar()</code> function is used</li>
<li>Uses <a href="http://unicornify.appspot.com/use-it" rel="nofollow ugc">Unicornify</a> service to grab unicornified avatars, the same way Gravatar works</li>
<li>Emails registered in Gravatar service are not changed, and their Gravatar is preserved</li>
<li>Emails not registered in Gravatar, instead of showing a default avatar, show a unicorn related to their specific email</li>
<li>When email is not provided (generally in anonymous comments), random unicorns are used, which change on every page reload</li>
<li>Of course, emails are preserved inside WordPress and never sent outside of it, privacy FTW 😉</li>
</ul>

Hikari Unicornified Gravatars

Hikari Unicornified Gravatars converts avatars from people that don't have a Gravatar, into customized unicorns.

Mirror Gravatar vs Hikari Unicornified Gravatars