Well – I had this brilliant idea. 🙂 I re-uploaded the avatar, and now it shows up again. Did the SP update change storage location for the avatar, or what could have caused this disappearing act?

As you are not using our Gravatar Cache plugin then gravatars are not stored anywhere. They are downloaded from the Gravatar site each time you use them (which is why the cache plugin is worth using of course). But your browser will cache them for some period – maybe a few days.

But no – we made no changes at all in core SP on avatars in 5.7.1 –  so all a bit puzzling.

I uploaded an avatar directly, so I am not going through gravatar. The uploaded avatar is #1 in the priority list of the profiles-avatar page, and the gravatar is #2.

I am sorry – i read Gravatar at the top by mistake. But we didn’t touch uploaded avatars either so I am still unsure what could have gone wrong. Mine here is uploaded and that travelled through the update with no problem. Sorry – still puzzled top be honest…

Well, at least this one had a simple solution – the rest is one of those mysteries of the cyber universe. But here is a question. I am not using the gravatar, but some forum members do. Would the gravatar cache plugin be an advantage for their gravatars – and if so, in which way? I am not quite clear about that.

It caches them locally so that once retrieved the site no longer has to keep going to gravatar to get them, It’s quite a performance boost for any forum using gravatars. Plus I have been doing some further optimisation over the last week to improve it even further in the next update

Personally I think it’s one of the best plugins we offer because it helps posts load faster – but only, as I say, if your users get their avatars that way