1

Some of the avatars are not displaying properly in chat messages or profile pages on Vanilla.  Can you please fix this?

2

Thanks - I’ve got a bug report filed for profile pages already, though since really we use wikiHow userpages rather than Vanilla profile pages, it’s not super high priority. It looks like most message images are showing up fine; however, when they’re individually wrong or out of synch, it often helps to sign all the way out of the forums, and of wikiHow, and then all the way back in. Give that a go, and hopefully it’ll do the trick. 

3

@Anna I have tried that, nothing have changed.

4

Hmm weird. It looks like in most cases it is still working - including plenty of new people and recent avatar changes. Can you try resetting your browser, or using an alternative browser that you’re not logged into wikiHow or the forums on yet? In the past I’ve observed that forcing the system to make a ‘fresh’ connection seems to fix any avatar funkiness. If it’s only happening for one person and we can’t reproduce the issue with others, this isn’t likely to be a bug fix we can tackle. I’d try the typical troubleshooting steps to see if any help: another browser, resetting your browser, trying a new avatar, etc. I think and hope something in the troubleshooting arsenal will fix it. We know that use of Vanilla comes with some quirks, but usually one of the workarounds gets the job done. If we see it happening to lots of folks over time and we can reproduce the issue, I can file a bug report with the engineers at that stage.

5

@Anna it is appearing as a broken image for my profile in Chrome as well.

6

I just tested changing my own avatar (on a sockpuppet account); when I initially went to the forums, it didn’t change (as expected), but when I logged out and logged back in, it did, showing the new image alongside my “Leave a Comment” box just fine. So I suspect that system is working okay for most folks (as also indicated by most people having pictures alongside their comments in the forums right now). 

@UpsandDowns1234 I’d be happy to help you troubleshoot more, but the only way I can really think to do that is for you to temporarily give me access to log in as you so I can try changing your avatar in different browsers. I understand if you don’t want to do that, of course! But if you decide you do, shoot me an email and we’ll take next steps there. Otherwise you might just have to keep trying different solutions on your own or live with the broken image. 

The part of this bug that does seem to affect lots of people, the forum profile picture being broken, is filed. It’s not very high priority due to the fact it doesn’t really affect any functions or the ability to edit/interact on wikiHow itself, but it’ll hopefully be fixed the next time an engineer gets a chance to do a couple of forum fixes at once.