Gravatar support?

[tessus]

I was thinking of adding Gravatar support. It's not so much a problem of implementation, but design. Thus I wanted to ask the main developers a few questions:

• are you even interested?
• should it be on or off by default?
• system or user option? or both?
• what happens, if no Gravatar pic is found? (I guess: show the default letter pic)
• should the user be able to enter a separate email address for the gravatar pic or is the user's email address the only option?

[karlitschek]

We talked about this before. If we add Gravatar then Gravatar could basically track every single click and action of every user in a private ownCloud instance. I don´t think we want that.

[tessus]

Ok, I was rather thinking of retrieving the picture only once (most likely when the user logs in for the first time). You could also have options to retrieve pictures always, periodically or manually.

But I see your point. It was just an idea.

[daryltucker]

I would like to be able to "Scrape Gravatar" for avatars.

This should be available for an individual contact, a group of contacts, or all contacts. There should be an option that skips any contact for whom you already have an avatar. After pulling avatars from Gravatar, the images should be saved permanently to prevent requiring frequent pulls.

[hroch]

Hi, we are using private avatar server, so we would be OK with such syping as we have also control over both ownCould and Gravatar.

It might be independent on what daryltucker proposed.

[MattiJarvinen-BA]

+1 for @tessus suggestion

1. Add default avatar option to Admin
2. Options (default [current letter div], gravatar, etc providers)
3. If default avatar is not set as "default" and user has not uploaded avatar himself (no avatar.jpg or avatar.png) > check avatar from provider, compare it against current data and if changed store result (gravatar image) after login as defaultAvatar.png or defaultAvatar.jpg.

[tessus]

@karlitschek closed the issue the same day I opened it. I doubt that any devs are still following this issue.
maybe there's a way to code it via a 3rd party extension, if they don't wanna put it in core.

[karlitschek]

Yes. Absolutely possible to implement this as a 3rdparty app. But this in not really interesting for core because of the mentioned reasons.

[tessus]

I agree, if you would retreieve/refresh the avatar for every single click, but people in this discussion where rather thinking of retrieving it only in 2 cases:

• on user create
• manually

[MorrisJobke]

@cosenal something for GSOC or OPW?

[cosenal]

@MorrisJobke All due respect to the OP's idea, but I'd invest our young workforce on somewhere else.

[tessus]

@cosenal Well then. How do get rid of the dreadful index.php in the URL or generate nice sharing links (which don't look like from yesteryear) sound to the leader of the young workforce? With all due respect, of course.

[LukasReschke]

We have new sharing URLs with ownCloud 8: /index.php/s/{token}, the index.php in the URL might be a thing.

[tessus]

Argh, sorry, I forgot that sarcasm is mostly neither understood nor appreciated. I didn't want my previous comment to be mean though.

[tessus]

@LukasReschke it should be rather easy to get rid of the index.php via a rewrite rule - unless it breaks things. but since you already use rewrites, this would certainly make sense.

[LukasReschke]

Between "should" and "hardcoded things in the code" is fairly a huge difference. It's not that easy as it seems :-)

[LukasReschke]

But yes, rewrite rules are the way to go. Though requires quite some code adjustments and testing. - I'll create a proposal for that.

[tessus]

@LukasReschke will there be different links for gallery or file listings?
gallery: /index.php/g/{token}
listing: /index.php/s/{token}
If not, can you point me to the right place in the code. I'll add it and create a pull request....

[LukasReschke]

@LukasReschke will there be different links for gallery or file listings?
gallery: /index.php/g/{token}
listing: /index.php/s/{token}
If not, can you point me to the right place in the code. I'll add it and create a pull request....

No. That's again another thing that won't be that easy to add. Routes on the / level can only be added from the core routing (code in /core/). However, doing that requires the app to be in core. Otherwise we would add third-party code (gallery) into core which we should not do.

Suboptimal, yes. The solution is to create a way for developers to create routes at that level on the application base.

[tessus]

I totally forgot that the gallery was not part of core. Understood, but yet again - a rewrite rule could solve this quite easily.
Btw, if you need help with testing the removal of index.php and/or removing it from the code, let me know.

[LukasReschke]

I totally forgot that the gallery was not part of core. Understood, but yet again - a rewrite rule could solve this quite easily.

Sure. But we will not add third-party code - also not rewrite rules - into core. That has to be solved on another level :-)

Created https://github.com/owncloud/core/wiki/Project-ideas#get-rid-of-indexphp-within-the-url - not sure if it is enough for GSoC but better to write it down than not doing it :-)

[DeepDiver1975]

There is already a configuration switch to remove index.php from any generated url within owncloud.

[cosenal]

@tessus I don't care about scarcasm or »leader of young workforce« (in fact I am honored! :P). What pisses me off is:

1. You mention a completely off-topic issue. You should open a separate issue when you do that;
2. You bold what you wrote for no reason whatsoever against any etiquette we have here.

About the technical issue, whatever DeepDiver1975 and LukasReschke said.

You're lucky in this community you'll always find nice people.

[tessus]

@DeepDiver1975 good to know. where is it? couldn't find it in the admin panel. or is the switch in config.php?

[tessus]

@cosenal I used bold to set the 2 topics apart from the rest of the text. OR DID YOU THINK I WAS SCREAMING AT YOU?
I'm sorry but bold and italics are used for emphasizing text. you can look it up in the markdown help.

Seriously, you are telling me I can't mention other stuff in the issue I created? If I wanted an official bug report, I would have opened a separate issue. I just mentioned them. Also, this bug is closed, thus I'm not even hijacking my own thread.

[DeepDiver1975]

I'm sitting in the airport and cannot look up the source code at the moment - sorry.

Please try to search in config.sample.php afaik it's documented there.

[tessus]

@DeepDiver1975 thank you, this info already helps a lot. cheers.

[tessus]

@DeepDiver1975 I checked the sample file on my 7.0.3 installation and https://github.com/owncloud/core/blob/master/config/config.sample.php in the repo. I couldn't find any reference to index.php.

[DeepDiver1975]

@DeepDiver1975 I checked the sample file on my 7.0.3 installation and https://github.com/owncloud/core/blob/master/config/config.sample.php in the repo. I couldn't find any reference to index.php.

Looks like the config flag is not documented - sorry for this. The config setting is named 'front_controller_active' and it should be set to true.

[tessus]

@DeepDiver1975 can we discuss this either in a different issue or via email? there are a few things I'd like to comment on regarding the index.php issue, but I'd rather not use this gravatar issue for doing so.

[DeepDiver1975]

@DeepDiver1975 can we discuss this either in a different issue or via email?

just open another issue here on github and cc me - and yes I'm aware that we are not jet done 😉

[tessus]

Done. Opened #12363

[tessus]

@daryltucker @hroch @MattiJarvinen It seems the best way to get Gravatar support is to write a 3rd party app.
Unfortunately I'm busy with a few other projects, so I'm not able to write it myself. I'm offering to do the code review though.

[andrewshadura]

Returning to this old issue, I wonder how this relates with the reality:

We talked about this before. If we add Gravatar then Gravatar could basically track every single click and action of every user in a private ownCloud instance. I don´t think we want that.

@karlitschek, could you please explain how Gravatar, Libravatar or any other local avatar-hosting service could track users provided it's accesses over HTTPS (meaning referring page is not being sent to them) and how does this breach users' privacy.

[karlitschek]

Gravatar pictures can contain tracking cookies even if sent via https.

[andrewshadura]

So?..

[LukasReschke]

Let's stop this endless discussion here; fact is:

1. Gravatar is potentially able to see which services you access. This is also a reason why GitHub proxies the Gravatar. However, we will not add such a proxy service to core.
2. Our core philosophy is to be self-contained and not to depend unnecessarily on external services if not absolutely required such as with the external storage.

We will not add such a service to core as our main concern is to create a secure and stable file share and sync solution. These are higher priorities than add yet another feature which is yet another technical debt and maintenance burden.

If somebody wants to have this feature they are more than welcome to create it as third-party application. If that requires adding new APIs to core the way to go is then to add these APIs and also connect things like user_ldap with it.

Thanks.