[radmoose]

I haven't written a plug in before and really don't have time to do it right now.

But Gravatars are pretty straight-forward.

The plug in should allow the site to default only to Gravatars or to allow them as optional settings.

Gravatar Plug in Setup Options
1. Gravtars - in additon to or only avatars available
2. Size - Gravatar supports auto resizeing between 1 and 512 (or source max)
3. Ratings - default to G but allow the site admin to optionally choose, PG, R or X ratings.
4. Default - Allow to pass the URL for the default (or choose one a the Gravatar.com defaults)

You take the email address of the user, do an MD5 hash on it, add it to a URL as a parameter for the graphic and you are done... yeah.. really.

I wish the default vBulletin system would directly support Gravatars =(

http://www.Gravatar.com

Note: To load up an avatar from Gravatar on a site like this one that has an option for a custom URL, either end the URL with .jpg after the hash, or if you have to add parameters, add something like &type=.jpg so the script will see that it is a "valid" image file. (vB looks for the file extension.)

My avatar on here was loaded from Gravatar, however, it is loaded once and stored on the system I believe. (and yes, I do look like that.)

My Current Gravatar is below.