Am I the only one thinking that the idea of allowing other people to post unfiltered images to your site — with the ability to change them at any time — might just be a potential time bomb?
Sure, they have the MPAA style ratings, but we’ll see how long THAT keeps working.
They’re not unfiltered… they’re rated by the administrator of the central repository. You then have control over what maximum rating to allow to be displayed on your site.
I say just pull the damn favicon.ico or livejournal icon or whatever. If they don’t have a site, they’re effectively anonymous anyway, unless they’re signed in with something like typekey.
As long as the admins keep manually rating the images, I don’t foresee a problem. Unless one of the admins decides he hates his job and starts deciding nudity should be rated “G,” of course.
You have to love that they offer a WP Plugin for it too.
My concern isn’t so much the images that might be served up but the page load time impact that the gravatars might have. It is still a cool idea though!
Most new ideas undergo a period of scepticism and prejudice, and gravatars are no different. I created the system for my fellow webloggers to use if they thought them appropriate for their sites, and liked the idea of avatars. I have personally rated every single gravatar, and really most people overestimate the challenge of this task. The most I’ve had to rate in one day is about 70, and that was right after both John Oxton and John Hicks implemented them. The MPAA ratings will *always* be accurate, and nudity will never be rated G. It’s not really something to be worried about. Also, Gravatars don’t really slow down page load speeds (since on modern browsers images load after the html) and won’t affect page layout as they load if you specify width and height in your css or html. A lot of people really enjoy the system, and it is to them that I happily provide the service. Oh, and WordPress was quite simply the only choice for the blog! Thanks for all your work on that, Matt.
Am I the only one thinking that the idea of allowing other people to post unfiltered images to your site — with the ability to change them at any time — might just be a potential time bomb?
Sure, they have the MPAA style ratings, but we’ll see how long THAT keeps working.
They’re not unfiltered… they’re rated by the administrator of the central repository. You then have control over what maximum rating to allow to be displayed on your site.
I say just pull the damn favicon.ico or livejournal icon or whatever. If they don’t have a site, they’re effectively anonymous anyway, unless they’re signed in with something like typekey.
Dave, what if this potential time bomb actually did explode? All you’d have to do is disable the plug-in. Not that big a deal, if you ask me.
And besides: most things on the web are contemporary. At least it was fun while it lasted 🙂
As long as the admins keep manually rating the images, I don’t foresee a problem. Unless one of the admins decides he hates his job and starts deciding nudity should be rated “G,” of course.
You have to love that they offer a WP Plugin for it too.
My concern isn’t so much the images that might be served up but the page load time impact that the gravatars might have. It is still a cool idea though!
Most new ideas undergo a period of scepticism and prejudice, and gravatars are no different. I created the system for my fellow webloggers to use if they thought them appropriate for their sites, and liked the idea of avatars. I have personally rated every single gravatar, and really most people overestimate the challenge of this task. The most I’ve had to rate in one day is about 70, and that was right after both John Oxton and John Hicks implemented them. The MPAA ratings will *always* be accurate, and nudity will never be rated G. It’s not really something to be worried about. Also, Gravatars don’t really slow down page load speeds (since on modern browsers images load after the html) and won’t affect page layout as they load if you specify width and height in your css or html. A lot of people really enjoy the system, and it is to them that I happily provide the service. Oh, and WordPress was quite simply the only choice for the blog! Thanks for all your work on that, Matt.