Gravatar Abuse Goes Unchecked – Reporting Needed
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I am a ‘site admin who needs a way to prevent members from displaying abusive and/or adult (sexual) oriented Gravatar avatars.
Our site requires “G” rated avatars but apparently either Gravatar is no longer enforcing this or the person who uses the particular avatars is misrating them as “G” when they aren’t.
This can’t go on. I looked and found no way to report Gravatar misuse and find this crazy. Is nobody supporting Gravatar at all these days? I just can’t see how it is not a major breach of trust if not worse for Gravatar to not be accountable for abuse of their service.
Is our site going to have to drop Gravatar? It is completely ridiculous to me that it would take a forum post to report misuse of Gravatar for an avatar, something I could end up needing to do dozens of times a day if more of the sites I admin had started using Gravatar avatars instead of only 1.
There has to be a way to report this or a way on my end that I can just disable select members’ Gravatar images without affecting the rest of the community which aren’t abusing the opportunity to pick a custom avatar.
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Hi Dave!
Can you point me to a blog of yours where you’re seeing inappropriate Gravatars?
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Hi Jeremey.
It’s not a blog, it’s a bargain website with a phpBB forum back end. An example of one of the abuser profiles is at the following link, although this person frequently rotates his avatar image so at the moment it is not as offensive as on some other days:
http://bensbargains.net/user-profile/zzyzx-5341/
What I need is a contact method to quickly resolve such issues, it can’t be something where I have to post and wait, we can’t allow that kind of content to stay up for days.
With Admin access to the forum I can deactivate accounts and change account email addresses so the gravatar image doesn’t show on posts but the maintenance aspect of continually doing this is problematic, particularly when a person can just create a new account, and with a need for coordination between different staff including moderators.
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Hey Dave,
Currently, it is up to the blog owner to set the accepted rating level for user Gravatars. The current user Gravatar you’re referring to is G-rated, so it will display on any site except those that have a PG rating. If you feel that someone’s Gravatar is offensive or improperly rated, you can use the “Report Abuse” link at the bottom of their Gravatar profile as shown here:
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Thanks Jeremey.
Yes that is the problem, that the user is rating other images he has used as G-rated when they aren’t.
Thanks for the link, it appears I’ll have to use the link to the gravatar image, reverse engineer the URL to point it to the Gravatar profile, then I can use the Report Abuse link on the profile.
What is the usual remedy when abuse is reported? Will Gravatar remove the image, re-rate the image, suspend the account, or some other action?
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Gravatar abuse requests are handled by our Terms of Service squad. If they feel like the Gravatar in some way violates our TOS or is improperly rated, they will take the appropriate action.
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