The idea of gravatars is nice … but only if you can get something out of it. Simply acting as a dictionary to lookup URLs for images doesn’t let you insert arbitrary evil advertising and javascript! So, you then get things like:

%%ping gravatar.com

Pinging gravatar.com [64.124.231.223] with 32 bytes of data:

Request timed out.
Request timed out.
Request timed out.
Request timed out.

Ping statistics for 64.124.231.223:
Packets: Sent = 4, Received = 0, Lost = 4 (100% loss)

What does this mean? Visitors in IE will choke because for some reason IE hangs while those images are timing out…

6 Responses to “Gravatar = Major Suckage”

1. Web Design Ireland says:

   3/26/2007 at 6:15 am

   great gravatar, im not sure how to go about it though!

   Reply
2. this one too says:

   11/22/2006 at 3:27 am

   sorry.

   Reply
3. guy says:

   11/22/2006 at 3:26 am

   Sorry, this is just to grab an 80×80 img of my gravatar.

   Reply
4. Gregory says:

   9/30/2005 at 5:29 am

   This is why I cache the gravatars on my site… using a groovy wordpress plugin. Solves these sort of problems.

   Reply
5. Web Design Ireland says:

   9/28/2005 at 4:24 am

   I have been trying to upload mine for the past week. After sucessful upload about 5 days ago I receive a mail:
   “Due to a server error, the gravatar you recently submitted was not stored properly. We have fixed the problem, and if you login to your gravatar account and re-upload your gravatar, we will rate it as soon as possible. We apologize for the inconvenience”
   Tried to upload evry day since then. Still the same problem. I have given up.

   Reply
6. Daniel NIcolas says:

   9/27/2005 at 8:46 pm

   I’m having problems with Gravatar today too. I think they are doing something with their server or something.

   Reply