Broken comment avatars

[aadilayub]

Quick summary

Avatars on activitypub comments become broken after the URL for the user's avatar changes on Mastodon's side.

Specifically, the first comment on this post.

The avatar used to load before, but now it's broken.

Steps to reproduce

I'm not sure how to give instructions to reproduce this, since it requires that someone else comments on your site and the URI for their avatar changes.

What you expected to happen

Every comment has a functional avatar. In the absence of an avatar, a fallback placeholder avatar is used.

What actually happened

When the comment author's avatar is not reachable, it results in a broken image on your site.

Impact

One

Available workarounds?

No but the platform is still usable

Logs or notes

Looking at the HTML, the comment by my friend uses this URL for the avatar:

https://sunbeam.city/system/accounts/avatars/000/038/480/original/a12605bee7e9406e.jpg

When I go to their profile on Mastodon and click inspect element on their avatar, I see that the actual URI for their avatar is

https://sunbeam.city/system/accounts/avatars/000/038/480/original/73da25f84ad489a3.jpg

[janboddez]

Related: #568.

That issue was closed because there is a follower update cron. (I noticed the issue in the context of followers' avatars.)

Not sure if a "commenter updater" is feasible. Storing them locally is what I do now, for a default duration of one month. Which people may not like, because it won't immediately reflect changes made on their end. (In fact, I think I may never update old comments. I'm not too sure anymore.) And so on.

Interested to hear about a better solution.

[aadilayub]

Is there a workaround to manually edit/update the avatar?

[janboddez]

The URL, I believe, is stored in a custom meta field (or custom post field). If you know a bit of SQL, it could be updated that way (but it is rather tedious).

There are other ways, but nothing easy. (I personally use a custom add-on plugin that fetches the avatar and stores it locally, and overwrites the aforementioned custom field with the "local" URL.)

I was initially also thinking of an extra field on the "Edit Comment screen" where one could view and possibly even edit the URL, but I'm afraid future versions of the plugin will make it harder to even access this screen (for "Fediverse comments," at least, the reasoning being that site admins shouldn't be able to just go and change other people's [remote] replies).

[github-actions]

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