Is this intended behavior? I had 4 guests post now (approved on first post), and they all have the same pink gravatar, which is highly unlikely to occur naturally.
SP doesn’t load gravatars for guests. Only for registered users who have user details stored. And I don’t know what the pink one is you refer to of course. What are your forum avatar settings and priorities?
Agh… is there a way to change that?
The priorities are:
WP Avatars
Gravatars
Uploaded Avatars
SP Default Avatars
Avatar Pool
Remote Avatar
We’re using WP avatars and gravatars pretty much exclusively, with only staff being registered users. Everyone else is a guest. So being able to let them be individuals, visually speaking, like with regular wordpress comments would be highly desirable.
So these pink ones are WP derived.
We can’t change the use of Gravatars and guests I am afraid. As I say, we have no data regarding guest posters. They can make up any number of email addresses and pose as a different user each time they visit. There is just not enough information to go on.
So you cannot use the default wordpress feature to generate gravatars based on their email/name combo? I’m ok with them making addresses and names up as they please. I just want them to look unique when they do it. 🙂
The same name/email combo translating to the same gravatar is perfectly fine.
Is that what the wp avatar option does? To be honest I have never used it. I will ask my colleague who largely put the SP avatar controls together.
Steve wont be back until late Tuesday so probably not on the forums until Wednesday evening.
But I had a play with all of these settings after your post yesterday and I don’t see which one of the WP options is supposed to generate an image based upon email address – although that is still not possible for a guest in any case.
I tried all of the WP options and they all seemed to give me what I expected. The ‘Mystery Man’ ‘Blank’ and ‘Gravatar Logo’ showed just that. And the others returned some random stuff but clearly from quite a small pool.
It looks to me from my tests that it seems to be working as it should. At least it seems to be working as I expect it to work from the options available.
That is pretty odd. The option is under Settings -> Discussion -> Avatars
There set the avatar to a generated one (wavatar for example) and it should work as expected.
The Wavatar randomly generated avatar is the relevant one. It generates based on the guest’s email, which is what I want, and yet somehow doesn’t work for the forum.
It likely doesn’t actually hand the guest’s email over to wordpress to fetch an avatar with, if I had to take a guess. So as a result everyone has the same wavatar.
When I selected ‘Wavatar’ (for example) this afternoon and looked at guest postings I did not have the same generated image for all the guests. I have no idea why not!
But yes – I have already said, twice now I think, that we do not pass or process an email address for guests. We do not even force a guest to enter an email address – that is an option the admin chooses.
But yes – we can talk about this here when Steve returns.
Steve is fine! Thanks for asking! just back from business trip…
yes, of course, I see the same thing as you… its really kind of expected…
wp wavatars are based on users who have an email address… guests to a wp site do not have to provide an email address either for a comment – though they can be required to supply… same for the forum – email addresses are not strictly required for posting though an admin can require…
that said, it an email address is available for the guest, it does not appear we are passing it along… I can play around a bit and see if that would have any positive impacts…
Need to also add that will have to consider if it would be a good idea to use guest email… keep in mind, its totally unverified in wp… so anyone could use an email address for themselves to attempt to represent some one else…
might not be an issue for a wavatar, but for other wp avatars (such as gravatar) might not be desirable…
hmmm.. in looking at this, seem to have uncovered a bug in one of our classes… not causing you your issue of course, but something to fix none the less… 😉
and should pass along that I think I will enhance the avatar stuff to pass along the email for guests…. should be in the next version… if all goes well, perhaps this weekend…