No-avatar avatar

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Bojhan's picture

I am somewhat estranged by the new no-avatar, avatar. The whole idea of avatars is for it to be an personal identifier of the person posting. Where as a persons face has a lot of emotional value, placing an avatar like this doesn't help identifying the person at all. Rather it creates an somewhat strange bond between no-avatar posters.

A no-avatar should either be very abstract with that clearly not an identifier, or should be unique to the person at hand. With that I want to stress that the current no-avatar is far from abstract, it actually caries emotional value by introducing the suit/tie - which implies certain business elements. Also the Drupal head to me caries to much weight, especially new members of our community might find that a bit awkward as they don't identify themselves with Drupal yet.

Comments

Wish to add that it is also

Bojhan's picture

Wish to add that it is also very similar to CommerceGuys its logo http://www.commerceguys.com/ . Obviously not intentional, just kind of weird.

Oh... ick

Michelle's picture

I saw that on someone else's post and thought it was a little weird but figured it was their avatar and they could have what they want. But I certainly don't want that thing on my posts. Do I need to upload a white square for my avatar? :P

Michelle

Also

Michelle's picture

That thing looks very male to me. I've never been big on the Drupalchix bandwagon but, jeez, having an avatar that assumes we're all males? Not cool.

Michelle

Agreed this is far from a

yoroy's picture

Agreed this is far from a sensible default. Either drop it or come up with something else. Should we open an issue in the webmasters queue somewhere? I have a very generic silhouette icon @ http://drupal.org/project/protocons for example.

good points - disabled

greggles's picture

The motivation to add this came from the discussion around improving the style of the voting widget - http://groups.drupal.org/node/65763 - and we felt that having a consistent presence of an image of a certain size would help. Realityloop created it and I don't think he intended it to be like the CommerceGuys logo nor an overly male image. I apologize for those mistakes and have removed it!

Now that I see it in action I've also realized that having a default avatar makes it harder to follow conversations rather than easier. The Gravatar system of creating a snowflake-style image based on the e-mail does a better job of creating something that visually represents a unique image per user which is of course what we are going for with an avatar.

As with every part of the site I hope people will propose new ideas that are improvements to the existing systems in place.

@yoroy the protocons example has some benefits (not overly Drupalish, gender neutral) but doesn't hit the spot for being visually unique per user. I'm tempted to just go for a blank white square like Michelle suggested or just some css width/height and white background since that takes up space to make a consistent visual design, but would love to hear of alternates.

Thanks for your interest in improving the site, everyone!

Avatar Selection

Michelle's picture

Why not use this http://drupal.org/project/avatar_selection and offer a bunch of preset ones to those who don't want to bother with making one of their own? Sure there will be duplication but odds are there won't be dupes in any given conversation if there's enough selection.

I'm not against avatars or anything... I just don't like using actual pictures of me and never bothered to find some other picture to stick up there since the avatars are optional here. If I just had to click on one in my account edit, that makes it nice and simple for me and other lazy people out there. ;)

Michelle

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apaderno's picture

If not having an avatar can cause some layout problem, why don't we adopt a neutral avatar with the right size (a transparent rectangle can be good)?

Tiburón's picture

Avatar Selection would mean producing a lot of generic avatars for people to chose from.

But it will not do much for uniqueness or create that personal relation between posts and author. Rather the opposite I would think.

Here is a thought experiment:

The number of registered accounts on d.o is properly larger than the number of people using g.d.o but since d.o is the account hub (with bakery) it would make sense to have the avatar defined there at some point.

Let's say the number of accounts is 200.000. With 20 generic avatars to chose from and disregarding for a moment that some will use there own avatar and some of the generic avatars will be more popular than others and further that the generic avatars will be evenly distributed across the accounts.

That would give 10.000 people using each of the generic avatars. This would mean that the generic avatars would confuse more than they would help as an avatar could represent several different people in the same discussion.

A better solution would indeed be to use Identicons based on some static and unique information from the accounts. It could be through the Gravatar service or by using a custom local module to build them. The Identicon generator was originally a WordPress plugin and was included into the Gravatar service at some point.

The Gravatar service (and thus the module http://drupal.org/project/gravatar) uses the accounts e-mail address as key but the Identicon generator simply takes a MD5 sum as key so one could use more static values as the user account id if one so chooses.

Regards

Christian Larsen

P.S. CAPTCHA on preview is bad mojo.

realityloop's picture

Hi All,

Sorry that I seem to have offended the women by male looking avatar, and the similarity to commerce guys logo is purely by chance.

If you want something thats not blank perhaps something like this would do:
http://clinician1.com/img/avatar-blank.jpg

If the avatars are right floated I think blank will work fine, I think right floating will also aid in scanning as they will always be in the same place rather than how indenting causes differeng placement across the width of the page with them currently left aligned.

Cheers,
Brian

@BrianGilbert_

Help make Drupal Melbourne meetups more awesome:
http://groups.drupal.org/node/204518

The best way to grow your local commununity is by participating in it!

No avatar means no avatar

winston's picture

Personally I think if someone doesn't want an avatar they probably would prefer to have it the way it is now.

If we're trying to solve a layout issue couldn't that be changed with some theming?

I find text often overlaps oddly with the avatar anyway depending on what html you have in your post.

Why floating left?

nadam's picture

Is there any reason for the current floating left location of the avatar? Obviously it messes up the text (especially numbered lists) and it's quite easy to change it to floating right.

/Adam

Random placement of up/down

winston's picture

See this page (testing for a new CT group home page) for an example of how up/down is placed in this situation (see right column)

http://groups.drupal.org/node/3100/og-panel/2

Example

nadam's picture

Edit: Some random text here for testing...

  1. Example
  2. of
  3. the
  4. problem
  5. with
  6. numbered
  7. lists

Edit: Maybe not a problem anymore. Adding some more text here to see what happens. Found another bug though, the avatar is not displayed in comment preview.

I supplied greggles with a

realityloop's picture

I supplied greggles with a fix for the layout issue with Avatars a week or so ago, I still think right alignment of avatar images makes sense though.

@BrianGilbert_

Help make Drupal Melbourne meetups more awesome:
http://groups.drupal.org/node/204518

The best way to grow your local commununity is by participating in it!

Awesome themer people who fixed avatars...

winston's picture

Want to take a look at this one??

http://groups.drupal.org/node/71013