Previously we used Gravatar to make our avatars work. But, we removed that, so Gravatar will no longer work. It was a long time coming. We’re in the process of removing 3rd-party things that track our learners. That’s mostly the motivation here. Gravatar’s free because every time you load up a Gravatar avatar on a website, it takes note of where you’ve been and builds a profile on you. My guess is that they’re taking all that data and using it for totally non-nefarious things. Long story short, we’re getting rid of Gravatar.
So that you’re not stuck with the default avatar, we added a buffet of avatars from which you can choose. I know, it’s not a lot, and it’s not particularly exciting. Hoping to expand this a bit more and do something fun with these, but for now you just get a handful to choose from. I, for one, am happy that I can finally identify as Mrs. Chou. Dream come true.
You may be asking, why can’t I just upload any old avatar I want? And the answer to that is… I don’t know, just seems like too much trouble to deal with, you know? Maybe we’ll do it at some point, but for now we didn’t want to deal with hosting images, moderating images, etc. That latter one is because we want to do a few things where you can (optionally!!) get involved with things that would show your avatar and username to other people. And we don’t really want to deal with what you upload and show to others. Go do your Reviews instead, you know?
To distract you from that bummer of a paragraph, big announcement about the avatars we did launch:
They’re all nonagons! That’s a nine-sided shape. Finally! It’s always been nonagon avatars, then dark mode, then “bring the summary page back” up at the top of the request list. A few of us were in a call, trying to decide if avatars should be more square shaped or round shaped—which, you know, thinking back we probably had better things to do than arguing about this. But, we couldn’t agree either way, which is why the argument was going so long, and then I was like “why don’t we do triangles, you know, for the cult thing?” and someone else was like “That cuts off too much of the avatar’s image,” then I said “let’s do one of those shapes with even more sides then, so it’s kinda like a circle but not a circle.” Everyone went silent, probably because they were in awe of my genius, and I used that time to look up what all the odd-sided shapes were called until I reached the biggest number I could count, the nine-sided shape, and exclaimed, “nonagons!” Everyone cheered, and we celebrated for nine days straight.
(Actually, the nine-sided avatar was mostly just a joke I said because we couldn’t agree on squares or circles but I guess someone has a good sense of humor because here we are with a shipped, nonagon avatar—and I think it’s perfect.)
