Replace Gravatar avatars with static images

[Gitoffthelawn]

Avatars served by gravatar behave, in some ways, similar to a CDN. At the least, gravatar poses many of the same issues as a traditional CDN.

Some websites like bitbucket.org don't look great when the user simply blocks access to gravatar.com.

Would it be reasonable for this extension to have an option to replace "gravatars" with a static image?

[RoxKilly]

@Gitoffthelawn nice idea. Never thought of that but you're right, gravatars have similar privacy exposuer to CDNs. Do you think they're used widely enough on the net to be of interest to DecentralEyes (given that this extension only concerns itself with the most popular scripts)?

[Gitoffthelawn]

@RoxKilly

Thanks! :-)

I think they are widely used, but that's based on my experiences and not any sort of global data. In the past month, there have over 8,000 (8,394 to be exact) requests to Gravatar domains on a system used by 6 people. On the same system, Decentralyes blocked a total of just over 35,000 CDN hits (wow!).

That indicates a significant number of Gravatar hits when compared to the massive amount of traffic Decentralyes is blocking. For about every 4 requests that Decentraleyes is redirecting, there is one Gravatar request that is not redirected. That's likely more than any single library that Decentralyze redirects.