GravatarIn what is hopefully an end to an embarrasing re-launch, Tom Werner of Gravatar fame states that they have finally fixed the problem which was causing people’s Gravatar’s to not appear properly. According to Tom:

The problem was that the library I am using to interface with S3 (AWS/S3 in Ruby) had a bit of a quirk that seemed like it should have worked, but didn’t.

This code connects to the S3 service, gets the ‘gravatar’ bucket, then grabs the file from it. Simple enough, but misleading. When you get the bucket, only the first 1000 items within it are returned (a byproduct of the Amazon S3 API). Then, when you try to grab your file from the bucket, the file will be returned only if the item was within those 1000 items. This explains why Gravatar worked fine at first, then degraded to where fewer and fewer successful syncs where happening. It’s a devious bug to detect, and the documentation was not forthcoming on why this might be happening.

If you have registered a Gravatar recently, you simply need to log in and reassign it to your E-mail address. Once that is done, it should show up properly on all blogs that have a Gravatar plugin loaded.   Once you’ve sync’d your Gravatar to your E-mail address, feel free to do a test comment below to make sure its working!   Unfortunately, I can’t test it myself as I have had mine for about a year now and those who had one previously haven’t had any problems.

As for Gravatar itself, I’m happy to see that the problem is hopefully fixed and I really enjoy using the plugin on this site. If you read the full explanation for the problem, you can see why it worked for everyone at first, including beta testers, but didn’t work later on. My problem is the way things were handled. Tom Werner, nor anyone representing Gravatar, took the time to respond to people’s comments and frustrations, or even put up a blog post that they were working on it. If this is the kind of interaction users of this product can expect, it is not going to last very long. Hopefully they will learn from this and use their blog to communicate with their users.