You don’t need to have a website or be a member of any specific community.

That’s it! From then on any time you leave a comment on a website or blog that has the feature your avatar will appear beside your undoubtedly witty and fascinating remarks.

As a person who runs a few websites I would even say that having an avatar is a basic courtesy to the site you are leaving comments on. Web developers labor for hours on the aesthetic of their sites and quite often build avatars into the function of the comments section to compliment the look. Not using an avatar can seriously distract from the look of a site and generally make the comments section feel transient and unprofessional at no fault of the designer.

So sign yourself up at Gravatar today!

Example of page with mixed avatar usage.

This year’s joke was particularly interesting to me as I worked a few years ago for a company that was plagued by Nigerian fraudsters. My job essentially consisted of identifying, tracking and getting rid of them.

Whoever thought of using them for the auto-reply example is in my mind is a genius!

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Google April Fools day joke 09