[michael3185]

@grassrootspa; So are you suggesting that just because Automattic run the Gravatar service, and decided to put it into the core of 1.0, that we should all be forced to use Gravatars?

If I upgrade to 1.0 I’d still have to use a plugin to allow my users – who don’t know or care about Gravatars and their ‘web presence’ – to have a profile image? Or does 1.0 allow users to select and upload an image like the excellent avatar-upload plugin I use on 0.9?

Come to that, if bbPress is advertised (and rightly so) as being so flexible and powerful, why can’t I upload a profile image on these forums? I personally, along with my forum users, don’t care if next year you can have your Gravatar beamed into deep space. Like many users, I prefer the quickest and simplest functionality, and functionality I control in any place on the web I visit, not having to be set in some central place and then appearing anywhere I add my email address, etc.

I don’t like this, “You’ll never have to upload your image again” idea. It takes control away from individuals, who should never be asked or required to identify themselves in a central image bank (even if it is with only an icon). I speak with some experience, as one of the female staff on a forum I built was stalked for some time by a very nasty guy. He didn’t see her Gravatar because she didn’t have one, but her worries would have continued for some time if she did have one. She’d have been desperately trying to remember every single site she’d put her email on to see whether her picture appeared there, in fear that the same thing could happen again with another head case.

0.9 makes a lot of sense in so many ways, but the more I hear about 1.0 and where it’s heading, the more I see, “Simple, fast, elegant” turning into, “Not so simple, not quite as fast, and elegant is debatable”.