Earlier this year, my avatar (the picture associated with your account and posts on phpList support forums) disappeared. If this has happened to you, here is how to restore it…
Background:
The ‘new’ phpList forums use discourse, an open source forum software recently developed from the ground up to address modern community communication needs, such as the use of mobile devices, etc. The logon information to the phpList forums is pushed from the phplist.org wordpress system via a wordpress plugin that links the wordpress logins to the phpList community discourse based forums.
Sometime in the first half of 2016, one of the upgrades to one of the above components caused many user’s avatar (picture) to ‘go away’.
Do this to restore your avatar:
Identify the email address associated with your phplist.org accounts:
- Login to https://www.phplist.org/wp-admin/ and hover your mouse in the upper right hand corner of the page, where it says ‘Howdy, yourusername’. Then move the mouse down to ‘settings’, ‘general’.
This will show you your email address that is associated with your phpList user account. We’ll need this information in the next step.
Login to gravatar.com and delete the email address from your gravatar account
- Log into http://gravatar.com . Gravatar is a service associated with Wordpress.com, where you can register an email address, a picture (usually a headshot) and a ‘public profile’ to be associated with that email address. This profile information is used by some sites when you register with an email address that has a registered email address on Gravatar. On a good day, this all works like magic!
a. Delete the phpList email address from your Gravatar account. This erases your current profile for that address.
b. Log out of Gravatar.com
Create a new account at gravatar.com and add the email address
c. Create a new account in Gravatar.com (I had to switch to another browser (i.e. from Firefox to Safari), in that I was automatically logged into Gravatar.com when using Firefox, and could not create a new account until I used a browser (Safari) that did not automatically login.
d. In the new account, register the email address that is used in your phpList.org/wp-admin account. Upload a picture to be used by Gravatar, associate your picture to your email address.
Log out of everywhere, and wait for the data to propogate
e. Log out of everything (phpList forums, phplist.org/wp-admin, and gravatar.com).
Now, take a day off, and let the systems do their things. In a couple of hours, up to a day, discourse will check with phpList.org wordpress, which will contact Gravatar.com, and download your picture from your newly created Gravatar.com account, and all will be updated.
Log back into the phplist.org forums, and enjoy your updated gravatar
Thanks to @samtuke and @martinovsenak for their help in working this out. It took several iterations of investigate/update/test to eliminate all the procedures that did not work.