WordPress MU

Hi, i'm not new to the blogs and forums thing, and now that most of the commercial forums give the ability to use external avatars and profile pictures and siggies, i would like to know if i'm the only one interested to create a central place for such content...?!

i know gravatar is obsolete, too much problems, server freak out too much in heaven... favatar is similar...

due to the fact that wordpress is a growing community and largeband process, i think it is a good guess to evaluate that it would provide a lot of users for a new system for hosting avatars and so...

i'm ready to start it up. don't know the name yet, but i'm sure it will work, because we have a solid ground and a large display of faulted projects... we know what to not do... and i'm in the business for so long that i have a solid knowledge of it.

so for now, i would be happy to have your echoes, if you want to share... if someone wants to work on the project, i would be happy to take the names and add to my IM.

so here are the first lines for a start:

1- users register only with their username/email.
2- free hosting of avatar, profile pic, signature.
3- some paid extras, like image edition and rotating imgs
4- each user have a minimal profile page, that display the sigs etc with a little description.. can be used as an alternate profile searchable by google.
5- a large base of images for public avatars, with editable ones.
6- possible siggies generators, with countdowns and texts rotating, webring like structures too.
7- smilies generator

... not too much content, people tend to exagerate when it comes to content...

I think this is an excellent initiative nexia, and I applaud you for taking it on.

One question I have is, are you trying to set this up for wpmu hosts to install this on their local setups? Or is this a service that you would be providing similar to gravatars.com?

I'm really looking for a simple, elegant, and seamless way to enable both registered users and commenters to add their own avatars.

If you want my suggestions or need any help testing this out you can add me to your msn: coolsool[at]hotmail.com

I'm with sulieman, this is a great idea. I'm also curious if it is hosted or a plugin admins can add.

While I like the idea of a hosted solution, remote hosting is precisely what is wrong with gravatars. It's too unstable to depend on the image hosting server to be up and running.

I'm willing to help and test as well.

My email is corourke[at]gmail.com

i think it's a good possibility to have it both hosted and provided as a plugin...

what i see is a plugin that will be enabled by default to use the global server, and the admin can switch to a "local" hosting so the members have to upload their avatar to the WP itself...

but as i suggest a global server too, i think it will be a good solution to have addons/plugins for the major forums/blogs systems... some forums have not any avatar thingy, like Vanilla, and a plugin would be possible... we just need a very simple system to grab the information on the global server... something like "if the global server is down, do not grab the avatars"...because i hate dead connections!

remember that i'm not a good coder, i'm a web-architect, so i'm used to build big projects with solid structure and good concepts...

oh ,btw... i will not start this project and stop it in half-development... i'm not the kind of guy with no resources that have a co-hosted sub-domain for a no-end website...

i've seen that most of the big projects like this are closed without any redirect and have no official release of the products... this is not my way of working.

...

also, as a second thought on the hosted/local version of the gadget, i can tell i already have most of the ideas developped but i just need to have the best techniques to apply it. with the final version, anybody can become "The Mega Host of Avatars"... so anybody can start his hosting solution of avatars, or switch and grab the avatars from somewhere else...

so as an example, wordpress.com can become a host for their client, or simply install the client-plugin, so the members of wordpress.com can activate it to grab the avatars from another host...

very cool nexia! keep us postd on how far you get with this, but i like the idea of a hosted and local avatar setup, with the option to be the hosted provider.

If there was some way to load balance this each different hosted provider could failover to the rest and share avatars. This way there is less chance of all avatars ever being unavailable. Sort of a peer to peer avatar hosting solution.

P2P shared hosting is possible.. we call this "mirroring".. lol

if someone wanna play with this, no problem, but i will not do it on my own behalf... someone wants to play with this will be welcome and credited as well.. lol