Gravatar Mix-Up and Solution
I have been wishing that GitHub for Mac would properly show my Gravatar since the first release so long ago. The problem is that on GitHub, my Gravatar shows up just fine:
but on GitHub for Mac, it's all the default I have no idea who you are… image:
The problem stems from the issue that Gravatar assumes that the email is all lower-case before it's sent to Gravatar for image lookup. This is compounded by the fact that Gravatar does not allow you to have two emails registered for the same Gravatar that only differ by the case in the email. This means that drbob@themanfromspud.com and drbob@TheManFromSPUD.com are totally different Gravatars, and the latter will never be found.
This is highlighted by the PHP code snippet that I found for successfully getting a Gravatar:
$out = "http://www.gravatar.com/avatar.php?gravatar_id=".md5(strlower($email_addr));
I'm willing to bet that GitHub for Mac is not doing the lower-casing of the email address before it's taking the MD5 hash and sending that to Gravatar. To test this, I changed the user.email parameter on my MacBook Pro and did a few checkins:
The commits I did today have the lower-case version of the user.email setting in the commits, but the older ones don't. This is a clear indication that I'm right. Now it's possible, I suppose, to go back and completely update all the repos I'm using, but I think that's a bit excessive. I'd like Gravatar to allow for mixed-case, but they just take the gravatar_id, and it's already MD5 based at that point.
Nope, this is a GitHub for Mac issue, and they need to lower-case the email address before they send it to Gravatar and then all will be well. I've sent in the request to GitHub, and we'll see what they have to say. I'm hoping they fix this, I do hate to see the little grey shadow for all my checkins.
UPDATE: Great News! I heard back from the GitHub for Mac guys:
From: Josh Abernathy (GitHub Staff) Subject: GitHub for Mac - Gravatar Mixup Hi Bob, Ahh, thanks for tracking that down for me. I've created an issue for it. Thanks!
so it looks like it's going to get fixed in an upcoming release of GitHub for Mac. That's such wonderful news as it means that all my avatars will be me and not the gray shadow. Super nice!