Gravatar
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Type of site
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Avatar hosting |
|---|---|
| Owner | Automattic |
| Created by | Tom Preston-Werner |
| Website | gravatar.com |
| Alexa rank |
 2,710 (June2016[update]) |
| Commercial | Yes |
| Registration | Optional |
Gravatar (a portmanteau of globally recognized avatar) is a service for providing globally unique avatars which was created by Tom Preston-Werner. Since 2007, it has been owned by Automattic, who have integrated it into their WordPress.com blogging platform.
On Gravatar, users can register an account based on their email address, and upload a digital avatar to be associated with the account. Gravatar plugins are available for popular blogging software; when the user posts a comment on such a blog that requires an email address, the blogging software checks whether that email address has an associated avatar at Gravatar. If so, the Gravatar is shown along with the comment. Gravatar support is provided natively in WordPress as of v2.5 and in web based project management application Redmine beginning with version 0.8. Support for Gravatar is also provided via third-party modules for web content management systems such as Drupal and MODx.
A Gravatar image can be up to 2048 pixels wide, is always square and is displayed at 80 by 80 pixels by default. If the uploaded avatar is larger or smaller, the avatar is scaled appropriately. Each Gravatar is rated with an MPAA-style age recommendation, which allows webmasters to control the content of the Gravatars displayed on their website.
Webmasters can also configure their system to automatically display an Identicon when a user has no registered Gravatar.
Gravatars are loaded from the Gravatar web-server using a URL containing an MD5 hash of the associated email address. However, this method has been shown to be vulnerable to dictionary attacks (in one real-life example over 10% of the email addresses of a set of forum users could be determined from the Gravatar URLs combined with the forum user names) and rainbow table approaches.
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