Avatar Privacy

Did you remember to visit the discussion settings page, activate ‘Show Avatars’? You have to enable avatars for this plugin to be able to do anything.

Depending on which options you selected, you might not see a change in the way the page looks. The changes are visible in the source code though:

• Look at the gravatar image URL of a user without a gravatar. The plugin works if the URL looks like [your site]/wp-content/uploads/avatar-privacy/cache/gravatars/[x]/[y]/[long SHA256 token]-68.png instead of https://secure.gravatar.com/avatar/[other long MD5 token]?s=68&d=http%3A%2F%2F1.gravatar.com%2Favatar%2F[long MD5 token]%3Fs%3D68&r=PG . There aren’t two URLs in there anymore, only one, and the default URL looks the same for two comments without a gravatar.
• You should see the checkbox on the comment form. You need to log out though to see it. If you are logged in, you should see a similar checkbox in your user profile in the WordPress backend.

Then you probably don’t use a modern theme which makes use of the function comment_form() to create the comment form. Check if you can find this function used in comments.php or a similar file of your theme. If you do and it still doesn’t work, tell me. Otherwise chances are that you do have to add the checkbox manually. Use this function:

<?php if ( \function_exists( 'Avatar_Privacy\gravatar_checkbox' ) ) { \Avatar_Privacy\gravatar_checkbox(); } ?>

The plugin saves additional data about whether commenters and users want to display a gravatar or not (if you select that mode in the settings). These data are deleted when you properly uninstall the plugin.

Apart from that, the plugin only filters data, but does not permanently change them. Especially, if you deactivate the plugin und have gravatars turned on, they will again show up for everybody, even those commenters and users who opted out of displaying gravatars. You do have to change the default gravatar back manually, though.

Yes, it certainly can. You have to be careful though which plugin options you select and how you cache your content. The first plugin option checks if a gravatar exists for a given e-mail address and, if not, displays the default image directly. If you cache the output of this check, the gravatar will not be displayed if the user later decides to sign up with Gravatar.com. If you’re using this option, you should invalidate cached pages with gravatars on them (mostly the single view of entries) regularly.

Yes, the plugin can be used on a multisite installation. You can either activate it on individual blogs or do a network activation. As users are global to a multisite installation, their choice regarding Gravatar.com use will affect all sites in the network. So if a user comments on blog A and chooses to display gravatars, this decision will be followed on blog B and C too. On new installations, comment author (i.e. non-user) opt-in is recorded per site, not per network. If you first installed Avatar Privacy 0.4 or earlier, the global table wp_avatar_privacy continues to be used for all sites in the multisite network. This behavior can be overriden by the network admin via the filter hook avatar_privacy_enable_global_table .

The plugin doesn’t save the value of the “use gravatar” checkbox for comments by registered users (see below), trackbacks/pingbacks (there is no e-mail address) and comments that are marked as spam when they are saved. If you mark a comment as spam later, the table entry is not removed, since the same e-mail address might also be used by non-spam comments. If a comment is marked as spam by Akismet or similar plugins and you later manually mark it as non-spam, what the user selected when submitting the comment will already be lost. This only happens with spam comments, not comments who just need to be moderated, e.g. because of the ‘needs at least one published comment’ rule.

While storing the cached avatar images on your own server will take some extra disk space, the plugin makes sure that it does not grow out of bounds by deleting cached gravatars every other day and all other images once a week. When the cached file is accessed again, it is automatically regenerated.

If you don’t have to worry about the amount of disk space consumed, you can extend the maximum age of cached files via the filter hooks avatar_privacy_gravatars_max_age and avatar_privacy_all_images_max_age . The cron job intervals can also be adjusted via hooks ( avatar_privacy_gravatars_cleanup_interval and avatar_privacy_all_images_cleanup_interval , respectively).

No, for registered users the user profile is checked, not the table for the commenter’s choices. Commenters can not override this value, not even the user themselves if they post a comment when not signed-in.

These plugins have been tested successfully in conjunction with Avatar Privacy:

• AntiSpam Bee
• bbPress
• BuddyPress
• Comments – wpDiscuz
• EWWW Image Optimizer
• Simple Author Box
• Simple Local Avatars
• Simple User Avatar
• Theme My Login
• Ultimate Member
• Webmention
• WP User Manager – User Profile Builder & Membership

Please note that several Jetpack by WordPress.com modules do not work well with Avatar Privacy because they generate their HTML markup on the WordPress.com servers.

If you find any problems with particular plugins, please tell me!

There is a difference between deactivating the plugin and uninstalling it. The plugin gets deactivated if you do so on the plugins page or if you simply delete the plugin files via FTP. No uninstallation tasks are performed then, so you can activate and deactivate the plugin as you want without losing the plugin’s settings.

If you deactivate the plugin und have gravatars turned on, they will again show up for everybody, even those commenters and users who opted out of displaying gravatars. If you changed the default avatar to one of the new local avatar images, the gravatars will not be displayed until you change the default avatar image back.

If you want to completely uninstall the plugin and get rid of any data in the database, you should properly uninstall it: Deactivate the plugin first via the WordPress plugins page and then click ‘delete’ (same page, next to the plugin). For multisite installations, this has to be done by the network administrator on the network plugins page.

The plugin saves additional data about whether commenters and users want to display a gravatar or not (if you select that mode in the settings). The following data are stored by the plugin and deleted upon uninstallation:

• custom table(s) [prefix]_avatar_privacy (global or per blog on new multisite installations)
• usermeta values per user: use_gravatar , avatar_privacy_hash , avatar_privacy_user_avatar
• option per blog: avatar_privacy_settings
• option per network ( sitemeta ) on multisite installations: avatar_privacy_salt
• transient per commenter: avapr_check_[mail hash]

The default avatar image is set to the mystery man if you selected one of the new local default avatar images.