so, several months back, there was a website update that added new icons for entities*. along with that (or maybe shortly thereafter), there also came a new icon for editors, removing all user avatars. I’m kinda curious if there was a reason this change was made?
*I will note, it took a bit for them to grow on me, but I do like the new entity icons~
an idea I also wanted to share, if we do bring back editor avatars, maybe instead of the typical square or circle crop, they could be hexagon cropped? after all, hexagons are the bestagons~ 
(that and it would match the hexagon icons used by all MetaBrainz projects)
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I’m not sure of the whole story (and I think this is what you’re talking about), but it seems Gravatar collects user data, so was removed.
You can see the ticket and related tickets here: [MBS-12137] Remove Gravatar - MetaBrainz JIRA
I remember @CatQuest railing against the avatars at some point, maybe they can shed more light for you.
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Funny article… I like that. I think Hexagons like that are a good thing. Lets you know who to avoid… or who to sign up to your pyramid sales scheme. 
Have you see the size of the average MB web page? I’m happy to not have avatars to add to the load times. Those pages are already really complex and heavy on the data. Happy to see editors by name. (It always amazes me the sheer size and complexity of the average MB page - those devs manage to get so much into a page 
)
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I tried to get used to the entity icons, but I ended up hiding them in my Stylus theme. I didn’t even notice that editor avatars were gone. 
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i have no idea how file storing works online, but maybe we could allow uploading images directly to mb, like most sites do. (if it doesn’t result in anything bad for us) because i do miss them, they were always a quick way to tell people apart without even reading their name. i also think it gave editors more of a personality, instead of just being a screen.
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