User Icons Testing

Robert

I must say, its nice to see that NodeBB won't depend so much on outside resources by default.

julian

@trevor Thanks! No clue why I added it, must've been superfluous... nice catch by yourself and @reid.

Edit: Bugs mentioned above (except for recent cards incompatibility) have been resolved.

exodo

You may have noticed I now have a user icon instead of an avatar... we're testing something new because we're looking to remove gravatar from core

New users will still show their old avatars (gravatars or not), so hopefully this isn't a breaking change. Please report any oddities here (such as user icons missing).

Will you keep gravatar as a plugin?

PitaJ

@exodo that sounds like an "of course" or "we'll keep it in core as an option" thing to me

julian

@pitaj In general, we'll try to minimise core as much as possible, so gravatar will be a plugin. Whether or not we develop it, or a third-party developer, is still open.

When this is tested and merged, there won't be gravatar support for a little bit, until said plugin is created.

Schamper

How will this work with plugins wanting to show a users' avatar?

reid

Breaks the chat taskbar.

julian

@reid said:

Breaks the chat taskbar.

Ah, nice catch!

@schamper I'll publish a guide on how to update your plugin templates

Henry Wright

The icons seem to be predominantly red in colour. Is the colour randomly generated?

julian

They are, yes. From a selection of 5 or 6 colours.

PitaJ

Custom colors ftw. You should add the uid as a classname for custom colors with custom CSS.

Something like user-icon-[uid]

Henry Wright

@julian you could get the colours to be more varied than that. In my project I used an MD5 hash of the person's username to get a hex colour that's highly likely to be unique. For ex:

$hash = md5( $username );
$hex_colour = substr( $hash, 0, 6 );

JavaScript obviously doesn't implement an md5() function but you could maybe use a library?

PitaJ

@henrywright hell, you could just generate six random hex characters and you'd do fine.

Henry Wright

@pitaj you could, but that doesn't quite achieve uniqueness. MD5 isn't perfect but 99.99% of the time you'll get a unique colour from a username argument.

PitaJ

@henrywright yeah, there's a chance, but it's rediculously small. You are 99.99999% likely to get a unique color.

Henry Wright

@pitaj true but calling something like MD5 on a username string will ensure you get the exact same colour for a particular user each time. That's something that's important if you're doing this each time on the fly and not storing the generated image.

julian

@reid said:

Breaks the chat taskbar.

Fixed now

julian

@henrywright said:

The icons seem to be predominantly red in colour. Is the colour randomly generated?

That's definitely unintentional, just luck

The reason why we select from a set list is mostly because not all colours look good as icons (e.g. pity the user who gets #ff0000 background), and maybe half don't look good with white as the text colour

These are some fancy colours that I use... (the yellow one doesn't work so well as you can see, and I don't use the greys at all)

trevor

@julian Nice color selection.

Henry Wright

@julian Thanks for explaining, that sounds reasonable to me!

Regarding the avatars on the users page https://community.nodebb.org/users

For me, it seems only some are loading. I see a lot of blank white space where an avatar should be. Also if I scroll down the page I see the mystery man instead of the new "letter" icon.

Is this just me? I'm currently using latest Chrome on Chrome OS.