Wikimedia replace for libavatar

[robe]

As noted in #2896 I had to remove our libavatar plugin for mediawiki as it doesn't work for mediawiki 1.35 and above and the mediawiki 1.34 we were on has reached EOL.

​https://www.mediawiki.org/wiki/Extension:Libravatar

That said I had installed Gravatar instead, but strk said there are issues with that as it will send traffic to Gravatar.com.

​https://www.mediawiki.org/wiki/Extension:Gravatar

It says it can use the libavatar service but didn't research enough to see how to do that.

[robe]

Reading thru the docs, it seems we can define a

$wgGravatarServer

in our settings to point at a libavatar service?

I don't know what to set that to.

[strk]

Libravatar was requested with #1688 (for the record). I left a request to bring the Libravatar back to life in ​https://www.mediawiki.org/w/index.php?title=Extension_talk%3ALibravatar#We'd_like_to_bring_this_back_to_life

Can you try setting that variable to libravatar.org for a start ? Ideally we'd run our own libravatar service, so to not send all traffic to libravatar.org, but until then, libravatar.org is a tad better than gravatar.com, if not else it should be already looking up DNS and thus allowing us to serve our avatars from a server of our choice.

Beside the variable I guess when we do that we'd also want to leave a note to users about what they are REALLY enabling with the relevant checkbox in ​https://wiki.osgeo.org/wiki/Special:Preferences

[strk]

I was wrong, pointing to the libravatar "bird site" won't implement the DNS lookup, so the only real way to support DNS lookups would be having our own DNS-looking cache server

[robe]

Moving my prior still open items to the next proposed Milestone