No more gravatars

A couple of minor changes. From now on, all comments will be held up to moderation and gravatars are off. This is because apparently blog commentator’s gravatar can cause legal trouble to the blogger. Yesterday I received a lovely settlement fee demand for 768,75€, because a certain stock photo agency claimed that there is an unauthorized image on my blog. As a proof they had printed the photo in question and an incredibly blurry screenshot which could be from on my site or not. It was impossible to tell for sure and there was no url present. The only two photos on the screenshot were gravatars of blog commentators. I couldn’t find the image/gravatar from my website and still don’t know has it been there at some point. The only possibility is probably some kind of spam comment that had gone through the filters and I had deleted it at some point later on. Even if it has been there, I really don’t understand how is it my responsibility if a blog commentator uses an unauthorized photo as his/her gravatar. Shouldn’t that be his/her problem or gravatar.com’s problem. I mean how on earth can a webmaster know if a commentator uses an unauthorized photo as gravatar. I obviously contacted the stock photo agency in question and we shall see how it goes. If there’s any common sense left in the world, I don’t need to pay them for an image I’ve never used or even seen before. Still this blog is a one man hobby and I don’t really want to fight these kind of battles and therefore gravatars are off. They don’t really add any value to the blog anyway.

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