OSNews

Thank you for building in an opt-out to this system.

You can't turn the gravatar thing off in v3. You can only turn avatars off in v4 - and the v4 avatars have nothing to do with gravatar (yet - OSN v4 might make use of the gravatar system, or it might not).

Edited 2007-07-03 20:56

Is there any reason for not supporting opt-out? After all, it's probably easier to do than implementing the Gravatar system.

Not that I hate icons, though.

Yes, there will be a turn off ability on v4 (which will be released sometime soon). Also, I was testing Gravatar on osnews for 2 months now (in the admin version) and on average, there are only about 1 gravatar icons per 100 comments. I don't expect it to be a big deal although it can be a bit of distraction if not more users don't get an icon. Hopefully, v4 is coming soon.

Edited 2007-07-03 21:02

Is this only for new comments, or will previous comments display the grav as well?

EDIT: Grav doesn't show up in nested comments in threaded view on Orange Platinum skin

Edited 2007-07-03 21:17

I have never seen yours actually. Are you sure you have registered at Gravatar with the current email address? I can see other gravatars with any theme and comment view.

Edited 2007-07-03 21:21

Yes, look at my other comments on this thread and you'll see my grav if it's a thread starter. I'm a long time user of gravatar.

I can see it now, but I have observed that your icon in particular is not always accessible. This might be a problem with one of Gravatar's servers.

Be that as it may, I have yet to see it in a nested comment anywhere on OSNews. Could some sort of caching mechanism on OSNews be interfering if it's not showing up when it should be?

Yes, it could be the osnews caching. It seems that when the caching was written down the specific gravatar server that was holding your icon was not responding. Give it 10 minutes or so. I can see your icon now on all views in my admin version that bypasses caching.

Edited 2007-07-03 21:40

In FF 2.0.x there is a brief flicker while a placeholder image is loaded if the user doesn't have a gravatar, i.e. the 'default' image is briefly displayed on the left hand side of the comment, then disappears. Do a hard refresh (Ctrl-F5) on this thread and you'll see it on Almafeta's first comment.

There is nothing to be done to fix this "flicker". This is the 1x1 pix placeholder if the user has no icon.

Also, your icon is down again, there is definitely a problem with your specific icon or server that holds your icon.

On top of that, here on Konqi, the "broken image" logo is displayed on all comments where the avatar don't work.

And when you look at a permalink, it always shows the broken image icon.

Edited 2007-07-03 21:58

The flicker I'm seeing is much larger than 1x1...if I had to guess I'd say more like 20x20, but it's very brief so hard to tell (less than a second). The displayed image is the standard broken image. Not a huge deal, but I'm a perfectionist.

It'd also be nice if gravas anchored back to the user's profile page

I see it.

Sweet. I've been using gravatar for a while now, it's always a nice touch when sites build in support for it.

Basically, this is how it works, yes, because the email address is used as an ID. However, many many sites support gravatar for 2 years now and there was never a privacy issue -- which is why we decided to go with it. IF there is a documented case against Gravatar though, we will of course retract support for it.

Their privacy statememt is pretty clear: http://site.gravatar.com/privacy

Edited 2007-07-03 21:26

wouldn't it be better to compare md5-hashes instead of the actual email-adrress?

It is not the email address that's transmitted each time in plain text, it is an encrypted hash based on the email address. Check their API and site for more explanation.

Edited 2007-07-03 21:27

I personally like it. Like with OS' , choice is good. You can always block gravatar pictures using a hosts file or any ad block application if you don't like them.

> the quote tag [ q ] and [ /q ] doesn't show-up properly in the preview

Yes, these were added by Adam long after I had written the preview code. I don't think they will ever be added there to be honest... just wait for v4.

Edited 2007-07-03 23:02

The server does not return a 404, there is an API to return a custom image, and this is what we do. We return a 1x1 image.

I will look at the permalink.php problem, but Konqueror showing a broken image elsewhere looks like a Konqueror bug.

EDIT: I found what the problem is, but we will have to wait for Adam to come back from vacations to fix it. Regarding Konqueror always showing a broken image instead of a 1x1 gif image, that's a bug in Konqueror.

Edited 2007-07-03 22:32

Ok, fixed both permalink.php and reply.php.

If Konqueror still has problems, then it's a bug on their side.

I can't see yours yet. It takes a bit for their DB to be refreshed, and then you will have to wait 10 more minutes for the osnews caching to be refreshed too. Also, make sure that you registered with them with the same email address as you did for osnews.

Edited 2007-07-03 22:55

It works now in my uncashed admin view.

Yay! I see it now. This is cool!

Now, the question is: why don't the OSNews editors have avatars? ;-)

I do.

Thom doesn't like them.

>The avatar shouldn't be in the body of the post but rather next to the name in the header.

Unfortunately this is not a good idea for comments that are replying to comments with long topics. It just doesn't fit I am afraid, not in this design anyway...

Not very popular I am afraid.

Unfortunately, as I explained above, there are MANY cases where the topic is too long and that would not fit the icon on th the table cells above. When Adam was writing v3 made clear that nothing else fits there -- at least not all the time.

You can turn off icons when V4 is getting released soon. Besides, as I also explained, most users won't have a gravatar, sans this very story.

there are MANY cases where the topic is too long and that would not fit the icon on th the table cells above

The MANY cases I really doubt, very long topics are rathere rare. If you look at the stories in todays frontpage there are far fewer(if any) long topics than the number of gravatars. And it's a simple problem to solve, by placing a length limitation on the subject field.

The only other case making trouble would be in Expanded Threaded view, with many successive replies. And simply placing the gravatar on top of the subject text her would not be a problem. It's treaded afterall, you don't read the subject line again and again.


You can turn off icons when V4 is getting released soon</>

Good.


[i]most users won't have a gravatar

That actually makes it worse, having the text start at different positions makes it harder to ignore/filter out.

What about putting them on the right side? That just seems more intuitive to me because you start reading from the left. It puts the focus on the comment text, not the avatar. For me, having it on the left is like "Bam, avatar!".

If someone doesn't like them, it seems to me they wouldn't be as noticable on the right. Or people that don't like them would grow to like them if they didn't find them as distracting.

I second this. On a 1024x768 screen with maximized browser (average these days?) there's still some space to the right of the current layout. Put it on the right at the top?

We will see what Adam says about this when he comes back from vacations. If he believes that it won't cause any problems, we can put it on the right-upper cells.

I see there's already a stylish style for this http://userstyles.org/styles/2789

Count me in for right-aligned icons as well.

IMHO avatars are junk!

I can see yours.

I'm all for this option. It helps put a face to the other users here.

Personally, I'm happy to see so many Futurama fans...don't forget, new episodes next year! :-)

Ahhhh, adblocker was on.

It has been already discussed.

"So when will you redo the site to use divs instead of tables? "

I'll answer this one for you as I'm sure the OSNews staff is sick of answering it: As soon as divs display consistently across a wide variety of browsers.

Repeat after me: There is nothing wrong with using tables to display tabular data.

As I said before, this is discussed, but we have to wait for Adam to decide if there is indeed space or not. I don't know all of Adam's code, so I can't do this change myself. Adam comes back in a week I think.

I just had another look at the code, I don't think we can put it in the header. You see, there is already a cell called "Score: X" or "OSN Staff" and this cell must be quite large -- larger than the icon needs to be which automatically adopts the width of the largest cell in the table. Because the headers are usually long, this will push the design 10% of the time to create a third line of text, and this will make the design really ugly.

Sorry, but looking at the code, it is not possible to put the icon on the headers. Just wait for version 4 of osnews where the design is different.

Edited 2007-07-04 16:58

Either their DB hasn't refreshed yet (it takes 20 mins or so), or your icon is as unlucky living on the same server as Jayson Knight's and it's up and down all the time.

Please wait for the caches to be refreshed. It is already been discussed twice in this discussion.