Back in August, I asked the following question: Why Is Gravatar Still Not Mainstream?. You folks supplied a wealth of answers to the question but many of the answers suggested something along the lines of making it easier to obtain a Gravatar through registration if they didn’t have one. While I’ve yet to see news on such an integration, there is a plugin that has been developed by Milan Dinic called Gravatar Signup Encouragement which enables you to encourage Gravatar registration to anyone who is not a registered member on your WordPress powered site.
Message can be shown to:
- unregistered commenters when they leave text input field for e-mail address
- registered commenters to whom their registered e-mail address is checked
- registered users on their profile page, to whom their registered e-mail address is checked
- users who fill registration form when they leave text input field for e-mail address
You can customize the message as you see fit. The plugin also provides flexibility in terms of where and when to display the message that encourages users to signup to Gravatar.
While it doesn’t do much for other services, this at least helps encourages those who are not registered users of Gravatar to perhaps create one for themselves with an easy to click link that takes them directly to the signup page. While it would be nice to have it integrated to the point where an end user can simply sign up right on the page they are on and afterwords, continue with their comment, this is a good start to get non Gravatar users familiar with the service.
I created Gravatar Box specifically to deal with this, for my case. I don’t allow registration on my site, but this uses javascript and is more or less instant gratification, and tends to work pretty well.
Note the “signup” link sends the user to gravatar.com with their information already filled in. All they have to do is upload a photo.
How many spammers use a Gravitar? If the answer is none or rare, perhaps that’s a rule that a spam plugin like Askimet could incorporate, along with a message in the comment form that states “un-gravitared” comments will be moderated and provide a link to Gravitar.
Whoa, are you sure that that’s such a good idea? It’s not like Gravatar’s an open standard or something … it’s just a website that’s owned by Automattic. Owned, and controlled by them.
Are you saying that only people who have an account there should be allowed a voice in the blogosphere? Because that kinda has creepy ramifications if all that power goes to their head someday.
Personally, I don’t think the question is “Will we have to rip-and-replace Gravatar,” but “when” and “how hard will it be?” The harder we make it now, the more it’s going to come back and bite us later.
I said moderated, not spammed (with added blog admin control on whether to use the option in the 1st place.)
Running WPMU I don’t encourage our users to use Gravatar simply because it’s a cloud service outside of control of our servers. Instead we opted to implement a local avatar system that we can actually support.
The cloud is nice and all for mom and pop shops and independent consultants that move from gig to gig, but in the corporate world IT is accountable to the services it supports and most cloud services by their very nature are outside of IT’s accountability.
I like the Gravatar system just the way it is, so I’m not going to do anything different (i.e. install something that encourages uploads, registration, etc.) on my blog just yet, but I’m glad the functionality is out there for folks who do.
No, that doesn’t actually exist; just throwing around some wild ideas. My mind works like that sometimes š
Askimet is good, but i m happy with my own Javascript that i coded myself, its easy to use and easy to interface too, but i would recommend Gravitar or Askimet for beginners, who don’t know to code.
They were talking about Gravatar here, not Akismet. Both are proprietary services owned by Automattic though, which are tied into the free and open-source WordPress software by default.
for one thing, not all themes support gravatars yet. I’ve been trying to get my theme gravatar friendly, but the author of the theme still won’t add gravatar support. its annoying.