Why do I have to use Gravatar here?

I want to add an avatar, but when I try to do that in my settings, I am directed to set up a Wordpress account to use Gravatar. While that's convient for some people, I don't at all like the thought of having my email address get sent over the internet to some external service just to fetch a photo I want to use on a bulletin board, wherever that might be. And what if I want to use different photos on different boards?

The discuss forum software defaults to Gravatar, which was hot at the time. It probably lets you have multiple pics.

I create odd email addresses to use for things like this, as well as others for more serious use. For example PayPal uses email as the username, so I have a very strange email address just for my PayPal account.

How do you manage them though? The password situation these days is terrible.

I think that was a trend, I haven't really seen any forums using 3rd party services for pics, maybe I am wrong about it. It does save on resources though. With a big user base, that turns into a pretty big load of data you have to host.

However I am realizing that all the user data, I don't mean the analysis stuff, but the stuff like, let them upload pics, let them bookmark topics, let them save an article to read for later...let them choose stuff and upload stuff and so on, it seems important for a viable forum, at least for my age group (18-30).

This forum is of course a support forum, so the question and answer format works well. I cut that out completely, it wasn't necessary. I wonder what other forms or format of postings there could be...

For this tech forum, I mean no one cares about bells and whistles around here, I would think.

But stuff like pics is now thought of as behavioral data, and its considered important. If your users are using your boards more, even for stuff like setting their 'mood' or changing their avatar, then that's considered good.

One popular and mature forum here in China just implemented a *requirement* that users have a pic uploaded in order to post any messages. That might be a bit extreme, but you want your users to do a little nesting at your site, buy in if you will. Then they are more likely to stay, more likely to be more involved, more likely to become a core member of your site.

So the idea of putting a barrier between the user and this function is not as hot as it might have seemed back 3-4 years ago.

But, it wasn't a big deal, I implemented in-system avatars pretty easily. Its just not needed here. I am sure they don't need the extra data to host and they are already facing the eventual transition to Discuss2.