Show WordPress comments with colorful letter avatars instead of gravatar
With the WP First Letter Avatar plug-in, you can display the first letter of the commentator as a colored avatar image. The plugin is a data protection compliant alternative to Gravatar and spices up your WordPress comments with colorful avatars.
In my post about WordPress plugins for better data protection , I presented the Avatar Privacy plugin, among other things. This means that the IP address of visitors is not passed on because the Gravatar images are cached locally for comments.
WP First Letter Avatar
In the comments to the post, WP First Letter Avatar was mentioned as an alternative, which simply shows the first letter of the commentator as a colored avatar. I found this idea convincing, which is why I tried and tested the plugin today.
Set custom avatars for users with no Gravatar. The avatar will be the first (or any other) letter of user's name on a colorful background.
The plugin is available on WordPress.org. Unfortunately, the last update was two years ago, which means that not all functions work with WordPress 4.9. More on that later.
Configure WordPress avatars
You can find the options of the plugin under Settings → WP First Letter Avatar .
With the Avatar set option, another set of images can be selected for the avatars. These differ mainly in the different fonts. In addition to default , opensans and roboto are available as standard.
By activating the Use Gravatar checkbox, the letter avatars should only be displayed if no Gravatar image is available. Unfortunately, this option no longer works with WordPress 4.9.8, so the plugin cannot be used in combination with Gravatar or Avatar Privacy.
In order for the letter avatars to be displayed correctly, the Use Gravatar option must be switched off . After that, all avatars will be converted as colored letters.
WordPress comments with colored letter avatar
With complete deactivation of the Gravatar function, the plugin also works as desired and now shows the first letter of the commentator as a colored avatar image.
A bit of a shame is the inability to show the author of the post with a separate avatar image in order to be able to distinguish him from the normal commentators.
My conclusion
WP First Letter Avatar is particularly suitable if the target group of the website mostly does not use Gravatar and most of the comments show the gray standard image. Then the colorful letter avatars provide a nice break up of the comments.
If you don't want to do without Gravatar images, I recommend the Avatar Privacy plug-in mentioned at the beginning. This means that the gravatars can be integrated in compliance with data protection regulations. I will also continue to use this plugin because many readers in the WordPress scene have a Gravatar account.
In and of itself an ideal, privacy-friendly alternative to Gravatar if you don't want to compromise.
In my opinion, the better alternative is Letter Avatars .
The last update was 7 months ago (instead of 2 years ago). Nevertheless, it should be installed and checked carefully. In the support forum there is a general PHP error (with fix) as well as a few problems with other plugins. With a bit of luck, the plugin author will find some time in the future to update the code accordingly.
I think it is very good that the avatars are created using real, CSS-formatted font letters (instead of stupid pixel images), which makes manual optical adjustment quite easy.
And best of all: If the "Show random colors" setting is activated, a different color is displayed for each comment. Because I was irritated when the same avatar is displayed, just because two commentators have the same first letter.
The icing on the cake has been there since my inquiry in the support forum almost two years ago: It is no longer a stupid random function, but the "random color" is calculated from a checksum of the e-mail address. This means that the same avatar color is displayed for the same commentators 🙂
Thank you for your comment and great suggestion! I didn't know Letter Avatars yet and it actually seems to be a very good alternative.
Many Greetings,
Brian