lol I didn’t realize someone also brought it up.
This is weird, but I think I can get used to it!
How do you change your avatar? Looks like it’s only currently linked to my e-mail for me with no seeming way to change it.
Go to your user preferences and then click on the link for Gravatar and then link that to your email and setup your avatar.
So I need to make a Word Press account?
So, here’s the deal with Gravatar and WordPress and why exactly it is confusing as fuck for users not intimately embedded in programming and software development.
When the Discourse dev team set out to do avatar management, they all agreed that they wanted it based off of a single management point. @CodingHorror is very much of the opinion that personal data–especially info related to authentication and passwords–needs to be centralized. The act of creating yet another username, password, avatar, etc. over and over boggles his mind, and I agree.
Gravatar is a very nice solution to this: A single place on the internet where you can create and manage custom avatars associated with your various email addresses. Then, as you traverse the internet, creating new accounts on new communities, if they support Gravatar, they can go out, slurp in your info automatically, and handle your little profile icons for you.
That is all that Gravatar did. A single place on the net where email addresses could be assigned to icons, and then federated out to all the websites that wished to talk. And all was right with the world…
…until WordPress bought Gravatar.
Technically, WordPress has owned Gravatar for awhile, the layman none the wiser. As we continue down the path of federated authentication, however, the powers that be decided that Gravatar being responsible for “just an icon” was wasteful–a entire set of authentication credentials could essentially be tied to an email address…not just a person’s avatar.
WordPress handled this style of “letting other websites log you in” using their own federated auth, aka WordPress Connect. But the powers that be eventually said, “Look, just fold Gravatar’s icon management into Connect ffs.” So they did. Which meant that existing Gravatar accounts were upgraded into full-blown WordPress Connect accounts. And…those that just wanted a simple good ol’ fashioned way to upload an manage an icon (read: this is all of you guys)…
…now have to create a WordPress Connect account.
Remember, the website only changed hands and altered functionality; it still does the thing that you want: centralize your ability to manage an Internet profile in one place, so that other places can refer to it. WordPress itself is a network of blogging tools, but you do not need to be a part of that (if you don’t wish to).
My advice is to simply jump through the hoops and make the Gravatar/WordPress Connect account and manage your avatar there. More websites will continue to lean on this technology, rather than less, so getting things done in one spot…once…will pay off in the long run.
1 Like
The irony of this situation is not lost on me.
Anyhoo, I understand the convenience of having centralized information, but that makes it an easy target, wouldn’t you say? Though I can’t speak for certain what kind of information they’re holding onto besides email addresses, it’s putting all your eggs in one basket. What’s to stop Word Press from distributing such information?
You mean distributing your encrypted password?
What good would that do anyone?
Further reading:
How does scrolling/page loading work with Discourse? Currently when I load up You laugh You lose, it takes about 3 mins for things to finally appear. images and video posts load all at once or only when a user scrolls to one? I’ll hit the arrow on the bottom right for the last post, and then I wait that 3 mins for the last post to load, while I scroll up and see other posts already half way done loading.
Loads external assets as you scroll to them. External, as in a linked YouTube clip or a linked animated GIF. Discourse remembers where you last were on a thread, so although you can use your old methodology of “return to a thread, click to the end, scroll back up through old posts” works, Discourse isn’t optimized for that style of jumping around.
It’s optimized to continue where you last left off, so that you don’t miss anything.
As a side note: If anything takes three minutes to load these days, you have a serious problem with either your a) internet connection or b) computer.
There are forum enthusiasts who leave e-mail notifications on? Hell no!
Don’t you want to know when we’re talking about you behind your back?
Should be strictly built into the UI, IMO, like the Unread tab. Nobody likes e-mail spam on an active forum.
Nobody…or you?
First: You control the level of notifications you want to receive in Discourse. See the “Watching” button at the bottom of the topic? Flip it to the setting you prefer.
Second: E-mail notifications are quite integral to the function of a quality set of forums. So much so, in fact, that the Discourse dev team is currently adding new functionality which allows you to reply to those E-mail notifications and have the forums auto-post them into the topic on your behalf.
Third (and most importantly): Discourse doesn’t mindlessly spam your E-mail; keep in mind the team involved in building it. They hate broken things on the internet. You get E-ailed when you want and…in the absence of that preference…when you should.
If a topic is created, and I’m not around to see that I’m being called out to answer a question – I may need an E-mail reminder to return. I think that’s reasonable, and doesn’t fall into a “spam” category.
After taking a look at the Watching/Tracking settings, I’m a bit confused. When it says you’ll be able to see a count of unread and new posts, does that mean within the e-mail notification or in general? It would be rather disturbing if it were the latter.
It means in general, and that’s indicated on the landing page (the one showing the entire list of topics). Topics that have new / unread posts added since your last visit are marked with a star (or a number). When you set your “Watching” status to “I don’t give a rat’s ass about this topic”, then it doesn’t matter how many new posts have been added…you’ll never see them indicated.
…which begs the next question: Why in God’s name would that functionality be considered…disturbing?
I think it’s a compromise between nobody and me disliking the spam. I’m sure there’s a fair amount of others who prefer to keep their forum surfing in-browser and out of e-mail. I’ve already adjusted the settings for me of course. Anyway, I find checking everything over is pretty easy with the regular UI functionality (new, unread, and the chat tab with @ replies to me).
I just don’t like how you have to go out of your way to opt out of email features on forums, in general. I used to be the type of person who posted on a given forum 20-30+ times a day. Given the default functionality on an active forum, that would just load up my inbox with no noticeable organizational improvement.
Reply via e-mail sounds like a pretty cool feature, but I think it’s an unnecessary middleman to that on-forum button which shows all of your personal notifications anyway. Maybe it’s just a clever way to link Discourse to your mobile device via e-mail instead of web browsing, since people more readily get e-mails on their phone while out as opposed to surfing the web in a browser. I generally check websites when I have time to sit down and comb over them, but e-mails are more “immediate” so that at least makes sense to me.
That said… I’d probably want to throw my phone if it keeps notifying me of a forum reply every 5 minutes, haha.
1 Like
Five minute replies are too much, I agree. Again, I believe the implementation in Discourse is fairly thoughtful, walking the fine line between “no engagement” and “unnecessary spamology”, but at the same time, still customizable.
FWIW, I learned this morning that Julie shares the same opinion as you:
“Simply replying to a topic should not automatically loop me in on
email notifications about the topic.”
When I pressed her further on why she thought this, she replied,
“Well, because sometimes I just want to reply to a topic to let a
person know that I agree with them…”
…and this is an example of another way that forums are broken, and which Discourse is fixing: the incessant one-liners of “ME TOO!” and “QFT” and “YES!!!” posts. You do not do this. If you agree with someone, now you click the heart icon to “like” it. And in doing so…you are not automatically looped in on E-mails, but achieve the same effect of acknowledgement to quality contributions.
This will come from training users on new behaviors, however, so we will stick to it.
It is to fill the gap left by mailing list functionality from the days of yore. As I understand it, many other systems allow you to reply via email (Julie told me LiveJournal.com does this), and you have to remember, forums aren’t always just for entertainment value – some corporations will set these up to handle tech support, q&a, all kinds of things, and require those additional mechanisms.
@Jungard As a sys admin, I cringe every time my phone alerts because it may or may not be some BS that I have to deal with. I have the default email settings and I have probably received…2 email alerts from Discourse, if that.
Just replying to the topic doesn’t generate an email notification only when you are replied to directly or like what I did with this post here, mentioned your @[username]. I hate bothersome and intrusive notifications and applications and I’m here to say, it is NBD.
2 Likes