- If the Gravatar servers are hacked, attackers could embed malicious code into links, which could be used in a variety of attacks including Denial of Service and may, although unlikely, lead to your blog being compromised. However, for this to happen, your site would have to be vulnerable to other attacks.

- Users control what rating their images receive. By accepting Gravatars, you accept the possibility that some users may use inappropriate images or images of a sensitive nature. Its also difficult to detect these images, unless you were monitoring every post comment on every post (impossible). The end result may be an unhappy user or visitor who blames your site, especially when they fail to understand how the Gravatar service work.

Case and point: They “were” the main vulnerabilities. The use of them now are pretty safe in my book plus it makes putting things up easier in the long run.

You raised some good points in your article though. Personally I like gravatars but I appreciate not everyone does. Perhaps there should be a checkbox to say display gravatars or not. Blogs with a lot of comments will obviously see page loading times increase too.

Not only can they clash with the design, but one comments wrote at length about how bad they are for security and privacy reasons.

I like the ideas of gravatars very much, but now I’m sorta on the fence as to whether I want to use them or not.

Currently I am using a plugin which pulls avatars from MyBlogLog however BloggingTips new design has Gravatars integrated and will be launched in a few days – I didn’t see the point in changing this when 2.5 launched as I knew the new design would support it