I agree. Gravatar must be alternative, but not one only option.

Thanks for the feedback, we try to avoid hosting peoples images (for various reasons) so it would be the “provide a url”-option I would vote for. I’m fairly happy with the gravatar service but if others have the same opinion we shall of course reconsider.

Anything happened on this?

I’d too prefer to upload an image here or provide an URL where the avatar can be downloaded. I feel a bit uncomfortable to open another account just to have a profile avatar here.

I agree with Volker. Not many will take the trouble to go open another a/c

I did, but I don’t care much. It takes half a minute and you never have to bother with it again. Most services even check gravatar.com when you provide an e-mail address, so it saves you from having to add your avatar to yet another forum/blog-thingy.

Franzk wrote:

I did, but I don't care much. It takes half a minute and you never have to bother with it again. Most services even check gravatar.com when you provide an e-mail address, so it saves you from having to add your avatar to yet another forum/blog-thingy.

I don’t want to have automatic avatars in services I’m in, so I won’t go and open Gravatar account…

I also already have far too many accounts over network. And OpenID is not solution to that; it is not amount of passwords but amount of useless services which will get data of me.

Smar wrote:

I also already have far too many accounts over network. And OpenID is not solution to that; it is not amount of passwords but amount of useless services which will get data of me.

I can sympathize with that, I always think twice when I see those “register here”-buttons for those same reasons.

We choose to use the fairly popular gravatar service to lift that maintenance burden from the site team and frankly speaking – we can’t match the image handling UI, age rating checks and copyright monitoring systems that gravatar has, even if we tried. And in my personal opinion the concept of gravatars (globally recognized avatar) makes sense. We also have gravatar support on our blogs.

Automattic [automattic.com], the WordPress related company behind gravatar, is well respected so I hope it will not deter too many from adding their profile image.

Hmm, seems like I forgot to say what I actually wanted:

I’m not against Gravatar, it is useful service for people who wants that kind of thingy. I just won’t use it, and won’t put avatar unless I can directly upload it to the server / provide link to it. For reasons mentioned above :)

Cheers, then we are on the same page :)