[[!tag wishlist]]
It would be nice if ikiwiki, particularly [[plugins/comments]]
-supported user avatar icons. I was considering adding a directive for this,
-as designed below.
+(but also, ideally, recentchanges) supported user avatar icons.
-However, there is no *good* service for mapping openids to avatars --
-openavatar has many issues, including not supporting delegated openids, and
-after trying it, I don't trust it to push users toward.
-Perhaps instead ikiwiki could get the email address from the openid
-provider, though I think the perl openid modules don't support the openid
-2.x feature that allows that.
-
-At the moment, working on this doesn't feel like a good use of my time.
---[[Joey]]
-
-----
-
-The directive displays a small avatar image for a user. Pass it the
-email address, openid, or wiki username of the user.
+Idea is to add a directive that displays a small avatar image for a user.
+Pass it a user's the email address, openid, username, or the md5 hash
+of their email address:
\[[!avatar user@example.com]]
\[[!avatar http://joey.kitenet.net/]]
\[[!avatar user]]
+ \[[!avatar hash]]
-The avatars are provided by various sites. For email addresses, it uses a
-[gravatar](http://gravatar.com/). For openid,
-[openavatar](http://www.openvatar.com/) is used. For a wiki username, the
-user's email address is looked up and the gravatar for that user is
-displayed. (Of course, the user has to have filled in their email address
-on their Preferences page for that to work.)
+These directives can then be hand-inserted onto pages, or more likely,
+included in eg, a comment post via a template.
An optional second parameter can be included, containing additional
options to pass in the
The `gravitar_options` setting in the setup file can be used to
specify additional options to pass. So for example if you want
to use wavatars everywhere, set it to "default=wavatar".
+
+The avatars are provided by various sites. For email addresses, it uses a
+[gravatar](http://gravatar.com/). For a wiki username, the
+user's email address is looked up and the gravatar for that user is
+displayed. (Of course, the user has to have filled in their email address
+on their Preferences page for that to work. Also, when the user changes
+their email address in Preferences, the gravatar won't change until the
+wiki is rebuilt.)
+
+For openid, openavatar sucked and is now dead. So we need to use an email
+address instead, I guess. Problem is that the email address of a given
+openid is only known when that user is logged in and making a change.
+And we don't want to leak an openid user's email into a page either.
+Hmm. Suppose the gravatar hash could be calculated from the email address
+and embedded instead of the openid? That would work for comments,
+but not if the directive were used elsewhere.
+
+Or, for openid, could use <http://paulisageek.com/openidavatar>. Which
+works fine, but users are not likely to figure out what they need to do to
+get an avatar associated with their openid.
+
+---
+
+Alternative, not overdesigned approach:
+
+Modify comments plugin to have an option to display avatars.
+
+When posting a comment, fill in the avatarhash field in the template.
+The hash is calculated from the user's email address. If the user's email
+is not known, skip it.
+
+End. :P
+
+---
+
+[libravatar](https://launchpad.net/libravatar) is a federated avatar
+system. Young but might be the right way to get avatars eventually.