This is getting ridiculous...
In my previous post I mentioned how I got rid of requests going to PayPal, and in a post before that I briefly mentioned getting rid of Gravatar.
I said that Gravatar can easily be turned off for the comment section, which turns out not to be true. WordPress is again being very misleading.
So what’s the problem?
I thought, that if I chose the Generated “Retro” as default, it would do so locally. As it turns out, it is actually Generated by Gravatar.
I thought, no problem. I will simply switch to “Mystery Person” which is a static image and shouldn’t go to Gravatar… But it still does, and the hashed email address still gets sent to Gravatar without logical need other than tracking.
I thought that’s weird… How about “Blank”? Still sends your email to Gravatar… OK OK, but what if I disable Avatars altogether? There can’t be requests to Gravatar without Avatars to display, right? WRONG!
This is madness. This means whenever you use WordPress, even without being connected to WordPress.com officially, you are still connected to them in a way.
I did never consent to this, and neither did my readers.
I am once more disappointed by WordPress.
But don’t worry, I’ll look into a solution right away…
I thought that being being so tech saavy you would not be using WordPress but some static HTML generator such as gatsbyjs.
I too find this surprising, and now you made me a little bit more paranoid. Thank you 😄
I thought of using one, actually. In the end I chose to use WordPress because I have experience with static site generators and it usually requires you to be on your workstation to be able to post, or any machine with access to your private git repo to modify files, add posts and then regenerate the site. WordPress allows me to create posts anytime from any device, which is important IMO when you’re trying to blog a lot. :)