User Icons Testing

[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

[henrywright]

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]

[henrywright]

@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.

[henrywright]

@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.

[henrywright]

@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.

[henrywright]

@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.

[julian]

Hm, that's not right... not sure why they're showing up blank, while two others were working okay.

Also there's a user named @ElonMusk LOL

[henrywright]

@julian said:

Also there's a user named @ElonMusk LOL

Yup, noticed that too. Keep an eye on the Tesla website for a NodeBB-powered forum

[xen]

Tooltip is not displayed on the teaser.

[julian]

@henrywright said:

Yup, .user-icon is the offending class and line-height is the offending property.

@pitaj @henrywright So yeah, changing this line-height to 31px fixes the issue. Fucking CSS, indeed.

[julian]

Thanks everybody for bug testing the user icons The branch was getting a little stale and I had to re-do bits and pieces of it as they conflicted with master

User Icons have landed in master!

Best of all, the user icons are all generated via CSS! No image processing required (though that was a possible avenue we considered but decided against).

Guide to implementing this in your own custom themes/plugins forthcoming. https://community.nodebb.org/topic/6583/0-9-0-breaking-changes/12