Avatars

The final section of the Discussion Settings page is Avatars. (See the nearby sidebar, “What are avatars, and how do they relate to WordPress?,” for information about avatars.) In this section, you can select different settings for the use and display of avatars on your site:
1. In the Avatar Display section (see Figure 3-5), decide how to display
avatars on your site.
You have two options:
• Don’t Show Avatars: Select this radio button if you don’t want
your blog to display avatars.
• Show Avatars: Select this radio button to have your blog
display avatars.
2. In the Maximum Rating section, select the radio button for the maxi-
mum avatar rating you want to allow for the avatars that do appear on
your site.
This feature works much like the American movie-rating system. You
can select G, PG, R, and X ratings for the avatars that appear on your
site, as shown in Figure 3-5. If your site is family-friendly, you probably
don’t want it to display R- or X-rated avatars, so select G or PG.
3. Select the radio button for a default avatar in the Default Avatar
section (see Figure 3-5).
4. Click the Save Changes button.
Avatars appear in a couple of places:
✦ The Comments page in the Dashboard: In Figure 3-6, the first two com-
ments display either the commenter’s avatar or the default avatar if the
commenter hasn’t created his or her own.
✦ The comments on individual blog posts in your blog: Figure 3-7 shows
a list of comments on a blog post. If the user doesn’t have an avatar
assigned from http://gravatar.com, the default avatar appears.
To enable the display of avatars in comments on your blog, the Comments
template (comments.php) in your active theme has to contain the code to
display them. Hop on over to Book VI to find information about themes and
templates, including template tags that allow you to display avatars in your
comment list.
Click the Save Changes button after you set all your options on the Discussion Settings page to make the changes take effect.