Avatar Privacy

Avatars from Gravatar.com are great, but they come with certain privacy implications. You as site admin may already know this, but your visitors and users probably don’t. Avatar Privacy can help to improve the privacy situation by making some subtle changes to the way avatars are displayed on your site.

The plugin works without changing your theme files (for reasonably modern themes), and it does support multisite installations. Please note that the plugin does not provide an options page of its own, it rather adds to the existing discussion settings page.

Features

The plugin’s features summed up:

• Self-uploaded avatars for users (and custom default images), hosted on your server.
• Users and commenters explicitly opt-in before using gravatars.
• Gravatar caching to ensure the privacy of your website visitors.
• Don’t publish weakly encrypted e-mail addresses of comment authors.

A more detailed examination of the reasons for using Avatar Privacy can be found on the plugin homepage.

WP-CLI Commands

Avatar Privacy includes the following WP-CLI commands:

• wp avatar-privacy db show: Show information about the custom database table(s).
• wp avatar-privacy db list: List entries in the custom database table(s).
• wp avatar-privacy db create: Create the custom database table.
• wp avatar-privacy db upgrade: Upgrade the structure of the custom database table.
• wp avatar-privacy default get-custom-default-avatar: Show information about the custom default avatar for the site.
• wp avatar-privacy default set-custom-default-avatar: Set a custom default avatar for the site.
• wp avatar-privacy default delete-custom-default-avatar: Delete the custom default avatar for the site.
• wp avatar-privacy cron list: List active cron jobs created by the plugin.
• wp avatar-privacy cron delete: Delete cron jobs created by the plugin.
• wp avatar-privacy user set-local-avatar: Set a local avatar image for a user.
• wp avatar-privacy user delete-local-avatar: Delete the local avatar image for a user.
• wp avatar-privacy uninstall: Remove data added by Avatar Privacy.

Feedback

Please report any problems with the plugin, I’ll do my best to sort things out. You can use the contact form on my code site or create a topic in the support forum. You can contact me in German or English.

Credits

Avatar Privacy is based on the original plugin by Johannes Freudendahl. The new release also includes work by several other people:

• Daniel Mester Pirttijärvi (Jdenticon),
• Shamus Young (Wavatars),
• Andreas Gohr (the original MonsterID and RingIcon),
• Scott Sherrill-Mix & Katherine Garner (the hand-drawn monster update)
• Benjamin Laugueux, Grummfy, Lucas Michot & Arjen van der Meijden (Identicon),
• David Revoy (Bird and Cat Avatars),
• Zikri Kader, Colin Davis & Nimiq (RoboHash), and
• Johanna Amann (the Avatar Privacy icon).