[_ck_]

I think there is indeed a gravatar for bbpress plugin but I like the more developed avatar plugin by Louise Dade.

A locally cached copy of a gravatar is always better than relying on the remote copy, even with the enhanced WP speed. Perhaps Louise’s can show the remote gravatar and give the member the option to use it as the default local. I’ve got a very large blog using gravatars and polling for a couple thousand members is a serious load issue with gravatars.

Then there is the issue of universal avatar support across bbPress<->WP which I don’t quite have working yet, I have to look at what other people have done.

In any case this is a good move for gravatars. But I simply cannot believe they built something with Ruby on Rails and were hoping to scale it for millions of users though. That’s going to have to be changed radically.