MyBB Community Forums

So I was wondering, man this guy couldn't of just made a plugin that is hosted locally so I can use my own images? Then it dawned on me: This guy ain't doing it for free.  He's using the images to track our browsers to fulfill whatever evil purpose he desires.  We all have the power to do things to improve this software, but the plugins that we use (especially if hosted on this site) should be required to be fully released under the GNU license, ensuring they are completely free.  I wouldn't mind what the author is doing that much if he did the following:

1. Let unsuspecting people know of the privacy invasions.

2. Release all source code used in the software, so users are not forced to go through your website.

If you wanna see for yourself install the plugin and notice that any page which has those random avatars now will say in Firefox "Blocking content that could be used to track you" it won't display the images either.  This is just a heads up for unsuspecting victims out there.  I noticed that this plugin was made by a MyBB staff member.  Let's hope they do the right thing and leave this post up here.

DVZ Random Avatars description Wrote:Implementation of Gravatar's default avatars for MyBB.
A randomly generated avatar is assigned after the registration so that new users could be easily distinguished.

as far as I know
* author is not using own images.
* author is not tracking users browsers.
* source code is in the plugin files. nothing is hidden.
* your browser (firefox) is just suspecting. it doesn't mean that author is the culprit.

As above, the plugin uses Garavatr to provide the images. Gravatars are used all around the web (such as on every WordPress install by default) to provide globally recognized avatars. Yes, there is a slight privacy concern in letting a third party have md5 encoded email addresses, but you don't have to install the plugin.

Regarding the license, the plugin is released under the Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial-ShareAlike 4.0 International license: http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-nc-sa/4.0/

Limiting people to only the GPL is not a good idea and is often seen as a key problem of the GPL. I, for instance, release almost all of my work as either MIT or BSD 3 Clause.

(2016-05-03, 01:52 AM)fysfdh3 Wrote: [ -> ]He's using the images to track our browsers to fulfill whatever evil purpose he desires.

The Gravatar service is operated by Automattic, the main contributor to WordPress, who also operate WordPress.com.

http://meta.stackexchange.com/questions/...4725#44725
Note that Gravatar integration is built into MyBB; DVZ Random Avatars doesn't expose users' e-mail addresses nor their MD5 hashes as the image is generated based on a random string.

Quote:2. Release all source code used in the software, so users are not forced to go through your website.

It already is; moreover, you can modify and redistribute under the rules described in CC BY-NC-SA 4.0.

Quote:the plugins that we use (especially if hosted on this site) should be required to be fully released under the GNU license, ensuring they are completely free

While MyBB is and will be free and we will continue to support free open-source software (and only such submissions are allowed in the Extend section), we do not intend to limit the commercial exchange within and around the MyBB Community as there is no valid reason to do so.