Delete or Improve Avatars

Registered by Danielle Foré

This blueprint is meant to collect bug reports related to the avatar. The question is whether to try to improve avatars or just remove them altogether.

The basic problem is that very few people actually have avatars set. Right now, avatars come from the service gravatar. This makes them pretty useless in terms of quickly identifying the sender of an email.

We could add maybe libfolks as a source for avatars. But this only solves the problem for people you know. If you get an email from someone you don't know, they most likely won't have an avatar and there's a strong chance that even if they did have an avatar you wouldn't recognize them anyways.

Something that avatars theoretically do is make it easier to pick out which emails in a conversation come from which participant. Namely, if you are looking for something a specific participant said, you can quickly filter out other people. Both an avatar and avatar-less solution should seek to solve this problem. At the moment this problem is not really solved by avatars since they are likely all the mystery man.

At the moment notifications make use of avatars. Theoretically this lets you see that you have a new notification from a specific person. However if you have multiple means of communication all using avatars, this could make it difficult to know how they contacted you. This isn't necessarily an argument against avatars completely, but that maybe avatars in notifications don't make a lot of sense.

Blueprint information

Status:
Complete
Approver:
None
Priority:
Undefined
Drafter:
Danielle Foré
Direction:
Needs approval
Assignee:
None
Definition:
Obsolete
Series goal:
None
Implementation:
Unknown
Milestone target:
None
Completed by
Danielle Foré

Whiteboard

Some mail services or OSes display a generated avatar for users without one. I.e. a solid color with the user's initials in white. This aids in seeing which mail came from which user even if nobody has an avatar set. ~ cassidyjames

See http://googleappsupdates.blogspot.com/2015/09/change-to-default-avatar-for-google.html for an example.

(?)

Work Items

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