Support for anonymous users

[eelkeblok]

What would be involved to be able to support anonymous users? If I understand the architecture correctly, the module essentially auto-populates the user picture field on registered users, which I suppose complicates giving anonymous users an avatar. However, arguably, the appeal of services like Gravatar is that you can have your personalized avatar on sites even if you don't have a registered user account.

[dpi]

Normally the picture field is filled with a picture for each user, but this can be a problem since anonymous aren't 100% users. The anonymous user also represents more than one person.

As an alternative, you can upload a picture to be the default image. But this picture will not vary per piece of anonymous submitted content.

I'm sure there's ways to do this, but I have not accounted for this scenario. Im open for ideas or contributions.

[dpi]

Task up for grabs:

Identify where anonymous users can post content, and where their pictures would be exposed. Including Drupal core and major module projects.

[eelkeblok]

I'm thinking it maybe should be possible to do some preprocessing while rendering an anonymous user. This should go a long way in supporting most scenario's, provided that the user is rendered in a standard way. I was some way into trying to implement this, unfortunately, I don't have much time to work on this project.

[eelkeblok]

Having had a look at my code again, I realise that comments is one of the few places this is possible at all (and is what I'm interested in), because these can be configured for anonymous users to leave their email address. Without that, it would be hard to add any meaningful anonymous avatar.

[eelkeblok]

I am wondering now whether it would make sense to change the way to display avatars altogether to a pseudo field. The module is currently based on a picture field that is being populated by the module. What if the module instead offered a pseudo field that determined the image to render dynamically whenever it needed rendering? This would be a great way to break into the anonymous user rendering. It should support any sort of image rendering a regular image field would also support (I am not sure how much of a challenge that is). I think that would also be cleaner than requiring two image fields on the user profile; one for supporting image upload and one for the module to populate based on its business logic.

[dpi]

References this issue: http://drupal.stackexchange.com/questions/223372/gravatar-doesnt-render-for-anonymous-commenters

[dpi]

Relevant to this issue: Unify anonymous and registered users (and related issues)

[ao2]

This is a show-stopper for me. On my D6 site gravatar was only used to show a picture for unauthenticated comments but it looks like this is still not possible in D8 with this module.

Since, in my case, unauthenticated users must leave the email address when they leave a comment maybe a solution can still be found using some service from the avatars module but I haven't experimented with that yet. Maybe something at the theme layer?

Do you think it would be possible to use a theme preprocess function and populate user_picture there using the avatar generator and the commenter email address? Has anyone done something like that already?

Thanks,
Antonio

[eelkeblok]

For my own websites I indeed solved the entire problem in the theme layer. Sorry, I don't remember details, but I believe turning an email-adress into a gravatar URL is as simple as md5-ing the address, or something (details may be found in the gravatar developer docs). This simple approach wil of course only work if you only need support for anonymous users; as soon as you also need to support a user picture uploaded to your own site things will become more complicated and a single point of entry would be very welcome.

[dpi]

Ive released a module which will be required for sites to support avatars for anonymously posted comments with Avatar Kit 2.0: Anonymous Comment User Info

[ao2]

Thanks @dpi.

I am not sure when I'll get the chance to try it out, but as soon as I do I'll provide some feedback here.