Plugin generates avatars in the background

@zemledelie are reporting an issue, or you are seeking for help to debug something? Would you elaborate please?

I am reporting a problem. After my host reported that the inode limit was running out (1 million!), I started looking for where they were disappearing to. In the uploads folder, I found the letter-avatar directory, which contains more than 800 thousand files. At the same time, I have about 8 thousand active users. Right before my eyes, new avatar files appear in the svg format (as I specified in the settings). I cannot understand the reasons for the new files being born. If you can help, help.

It looks like the files are generated sequentially: EE EC EB ED etc. Why and for what purpose does this happen?

@zemledelie that’s actually something kind of normal to happen, i explain the reason of it.

When you use the plugin, it generates a single avatar for each user. This avatar is generated according to the settings you define in settings page and given the user name initials. The generation process happens automatically when a new avatar is requested.
If any of this settings change the user avatar will be generated again, however, the old version of the avatar will no be deleted. That would lead to have multiple avatars for the same user in uploads folder.

That’s the reason why you might have more avatar images than users in you site.

User avatars have small size as they are very simple SVGs, so it shouldn’t be a problem to have all of them hosted.

If you still have a problem with that, just delete all avatar SVGs manually, the plugin will generate them again automatically.

Thank you for your help. It would probably be right to somehow control avatars. Because out of 8 thousand users, 800 thousand avatars were created. Something is wrong here, isn’t it? It turns out that if we delete a user (and this happens to me often, because I fight bots), then the avatar remains and the plugin forgets about it?

You are correct if you delete a user the avatars will remain, that’s another reason to get that amount of avatars. But again, that’s the plugin behaviour.

Maybe it would be a good idea to have a button “Delete cache” to clean all svg images.

Where should such a button be? If you are a plugin developer and you have the strength to improve it, perhaps you can somehow solve this problem

It’s just a suggestion, it needs to be developed of course.

Thank you, you helped me a lot

Comment id does not have anything to do with avatar generation. In comments, the user id or email is what is used to generate the avatar.

May I ask, what is the size of the letter avatar folder you have in uplaods?