Here’s how gravatars work….

A commenter creates an image suitable for a gravatar and uploads it to his account on gravatar.com.  The gravatar is rated using pretty much the same ratings as the movie industry: G, PG, R, and X.  These ratings are used by bloggers to set limits on the kinds of gravatars that appear on their sites — a gravatar with a G rating will appear everywhere while a gravatar with an X rating may not appear on many blogs at all.

Meanwhile, a blogger (like me) sets up his/her blog to enable it for gravatars.  Then, when a commenter submits a comment, the blog’s gravatar plugin (automatic since WordPress 2.5) takes the commenter’s e-mail address (submitted in the comment form) and attempts to find a match at gravatar.com.  If it finds a match, it displays the corresponding image. (The e-mail address is not used anywhere in the underlying page code.)  If there’s no image on file, the blog software either displays nothing or displays a default image chosen by the blogger.

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