Just curious if there are any plans to allow non-Gravatar avatars? I’m not sure if it is default for discourse but this is the first time I’ve been forced to use Gravatar. (The less accounts I have the better I feel 
)
Not at present, but we’ll be reviewing this soon.
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Cool, thank you for the feedback!
Direct linkage would be nice so that we could upload to our own websites or popular image hosting websites like imgur, tinypic, etc.
It’s worth pointing out that Discourse would download it anyway because it’s moody like that.
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A PHP script can do a lot of sneaky or evil things if asked to serve images. For example, collect browser headers to track user page views (See: EFF’s panopticlick). Or shuffle a few inappropriate GIFs into an image rotation, for users who don’t visit much of the forum (assuming that moderators would browse a lot, so attempting to appear harmless to them).
The only way to be sure that everyone sees the same image would be to only display images that you host yourself, or that originate from a small whitelist of sites known to be safe.
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I believe that’s one of the reasons Discourse caches the avatars locally - to prevent those sorts of shenanigans.
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Yeah if you edit the .htaccess you could run anything on an image file through a PHP script(IP Logger, redirection, anything), but if you allow only the big image file hosting websites(Tinypic, Photobucket, Imgur, etc) or a local cache system(which stores data on servers which means more disk space), it’ll void those problems.
Last time I checked there was an option to upload your avatar directly to discourse, it just has to be enabled by the admins.
The only real problem I experienced with Gravatar was that it took a while to update once I uploaded my avatar.
That’s deliberately not enabled, at least for the moment. I don’t want to have to deal with shuffling tons of people’s avatars about.
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lel, just disinformation, just install xenforo, give us dem avatars, gravatars ftl, mot
I’d like to be able to upload my avatar. I don’t have, need or want Gravatar on my corporate account. 
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I’ve temporarily re-enabled local avatar upload, so you all can go to the Preferences page and click the refresh button here:
Once you click it, that should be all you need to do.
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