Gravatar Down…
It’s been a few days already without being able to pull any gravatars from the gravatar site.
Dusted up the old google-fu to see if I could find out what’s wrong and in the process got side tracked to this cached post saying that gravatar needs about 200Gb of bandwidth a month in order to support it’s users. Without sponsorship, that is indeed difficult.
There was a posted solution from wordpress forums, that you should configure your code to pull from the cached images and not from the gravatar site itself in order to reduce the strain on the servers… but with the site being down… that is next to impossible.
If you change the line in the plugin from:
$out = “http://www.gravatar.com/avatar.php?gravatar_id=”.md5($comment->comment_author_email);
to
$out = “http://wide.gravatar.com/avatar.php?gravatar_id=”.md5($comment->comment_author_email);
it then pulls the gravatar from a distributed cache proxy which should continue to work, even when gravatar.com goes down (so they say) plus as your using a cache of gravatars, it’s not putting as much a strain on the gravatar servers
Well, here’s wishing them goodluck
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