@Catija I think the legality / technicality / fair thing is that if they serve the image they want a micropayment (even non-monetary). But we can duplicate the code ourselves from the OpenSource code they use, compare our generated image to what is served by the other site, and if both are identical then we use the image that we made using our CPU cycles and serve it from i.stack.imgur .
@Rob So that one seems to include even Gravatar as a concern - is it? One of the reasons people like FB or Google or Gravatar as an avatar provider is that they can change it in one place that that will update everywhere.
keep it simple, all avatars are to be hosted by SO, any avatars currently in use go to the default. big uproar, and then 6 months later noone will remember, just like most of the other big things SO does that the community hates
I mean, people seem to already "hate" that we're potentially letting FB and Google track people's usage of our sites through user avatars, so to some degree, we're just annoying a different subset of users.
This is one in particular that i can care less about, i understand the complexities of it and why we can't just steal images from elsewhere, but i mean... how hard is it to just upload an image
it's a user-fixable problem
unlike the horrible font that requires a userscript to fix
@KevinB Sure, it's also a loss of functionality. It's not just a one-time image upload. If you change your FB avatar, it changes here, too... so by hosting the image here (assuming we don't occasionally pull updates from FB manually) the image won't change unless the user does it here manually. :) It doesn't bother me but it's possible that other people do care.
