Allow disabling avatar functionality?

[geerlingguy]

I'm setting up Remark42 on my personal site (see geerlingguy/jeffgeerling-com#167), and one thing I'm considering to maintain consistency with my old Drupal-based comments, as well as to reduce visual noise, is disabling avatars from displaying.

For anonymous auth especially, I find those default Gravatar icons a bit distracting. The quickest way would be to just use CSS, but is there any way to disable Gravatar/avatar caching entirely? I don't want to waste resources on something I wouldn't display.

[paskal]

The round shape comes from CSS in the frontend (border-radius on the avatar element), not from Gravatar — Gravatar always returns a square image.

UseGravatar: true is currently hardcoded in backend/app/cmd/server.go:1262 and there's no configuration parameter to disable it. Remark42 caches avatar images locally via the go-pkgz/auth avatar proxy, so Gravatar is only hit once per user rather than on every page load.

For hiding avatars visually, CSS is the only option right now, but since the widget renders in an iframe, you can't target it from the host page's stylesheet. You'd need to either:

1. Fork the frontend and remove the avatar rendering, or
2. Use a custom build with the avatar component hidden

Making Gravatar/avatar support configurable (e.g. an AVATAR_ENABLED=false parameter) is a possibility. I need to think about it, maybe we should provide easier frontend alterations than yet another backend flag.

[geerlingguy]

Thanks! It's a very low priority for me, though it would be nice to be able to opt out of Gravatar entirely, for those who don't want to use it.