If you’ve left a comment as a visitor, you might find that you used to have a crazy monster-looking avatar. Then, maybe, your avatar suddently looked like this (though, somehow, we doubt you’ve noticed):
Now, maybe, it looks like this (or something else if we’ve now set another avatar since we’ve written this):
Or maybe you’ve even logged in and submitted something and find that your avatar looks like the above only a bit darker.
We made the decision, recently, to stop using Gravatars on our website.
Gravatar is a WordPress service that pulls an image that you link with your email. So it’s nice in that it will pull up images set by visitors who leave a comment. But it also means that for each avatar there is, a request is made to secure.gravatar.com — which can impact speed. We have enough going on here that we will speed up things where we can and this was one of those things.
If you’d like to add your own avatar image on this website, you can easily do so if you log in and then go to your user profile. You can find a link in the menu.
When you’re there, hover over or click on your image and you’ll get the chance to upload your own, custom, avatar. You can also hover over the top corner of your cover image to find where you can change that. You can also find links to do so in the profile settings menu.
