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I was just browsing CGCC, and I went over to the meta, and noticed something strange: That's not the indenticon I've come to recognize. Somehow, my identicon changed sometime in the last day or two, and only on Meta. Across the entire network, my identicon on meta sites is different from my identicon on main sites.

There was recently a bug with community's profile picture, but this is a different bug. As pointed out by caird coinheringaahing, this seems to be a new bug that just happened and is affecting any users, not just older users. Also, this is entirely to do with the identicon, not a gravatar profile picture, as in the other related bugs that ollie mentioned.

My identicon on main

My identicon on meta

Why did this happen, and more importantly, is this supposed to happen?

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  • 1
    Bug report about the Community user's identicon. 1 hour ago, it was supposedly fixed, so I suspect that fix broke things for other users
    – caird coinheringaahing
    Commented Jul 19, 2021 at 14:22
  • 3
    @Ollie No, this is a different bug. That only affected older users, and started a few days ago. This appears to affect newer users as well, and just happened. Also, it appears to only affect users with identicon profile pictures, not those with "custom" profiles
    – caird coinheringaahing
    Commented Jul 19, 2021 at 14:22
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    Also broken: 1, 2, 3, 4. There are easily many more examples.
    – hyper-neutrino
    Commented Jul 19, 2021 at 14:25
  • Does this answer your question? Why has Community's profile picture changed?
    – Rob
    Commented Jul 19, 2021 at 15:09
  • @Rob See caird's comment and the first edit of the question.
    – Aaron Miller
    Commented Jul 19, 2021 at 15:14
  • @cairdcoinheringaahing & AaronMiller are you aware of animuson's comment; it's not only users before a particular date, and he supports that duplicate link (as it's in the banner above that comment). --- Thanks for keeping us honest Aaron.
    – Rob
    Commented Jul 19, 2021 at 15:24
  • @Rob I think the biggest argument against the duplicate is the changes reported only seem to affect users with identicon profile pictures - the other one affected users with both identicon and custom profile pictures
    – caird coinheringaahing
    Commented Jul 19, 2021 at 15:27
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    @Rob The bug with the Community profile pic was also reported to have been fixed, which, as caird said, is likely to be what caused this issue.
    – Aaron Miller
    Commented Jul 19, 2021 at 15:29
  • cairdcoinheringaahing & AaronMiller while we could credit aaron's comment instead, then I guess I could take credit for the review (and not caving). --- I'll stick with "that's the correct duplicate target" (which has a complicated set of rules on MSE); especially in light of the answer from Dean. 🦈
    – Rob
    Commented Jul 19, 2021 at 15:44
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    Close voters: I can see the relation, but that question about the community profile is not a duplicate.
    – user1271772
    Commented Jul 19, 2021 at 22:30

1 Answer 1

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Well this is fun, metas typically inherit their parent site's details, but a profile image backfill ran for each site independently which means the calculation for a Gravatar works on the data in each site's database. There is a slight inconsistency between some main site and meta site users that meant the Gravatar calculation worked out different URLs between those two.

We're not going to run the backfill again but the synchronization problem will address itself in the next few hours when a reconciliation job runs. In fact, I'm going to force that job to run in a moment so this should be in a sane state shortly. Eventual consistency :)

Apologies for the mess here, there are a million moving pieces to this part of the system and, sadly, not all of them are documented.

UPDATE There have been a few problems with the synchronisation process that mean this is still in a somewhat bad state. We’re fixing those and will get things back in order on Monday. Sorry for the delay

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  • I've just checked it on CGCC, and it seems to be fixed now. Thanks for the quick remediation!
    – Aaron Miller
    Commented Jul 19, 2021 at 15:37
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    Dean whac-a-mole Ward ...
    – rene
    Commented Jul 19, 2021 at 15:44
  • Having a bad day? ;)
    – Ollie
    Commented Jul 19, 2021 at 15:56
  • Is this [status-completed] now, then?
    – bobble
    Commented Jul 19, 2021 at 16:47
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    @bobble It's still going, has a lot of things to churn through
    – Dean Ward
    Commented Jul 19, 2021 at 16:48
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    I believe this is related to this backfill - this user's identicon appears to have been broken by this the other way around - their normal identicon shows up in the "change profile picture" screen but their picture has been altered to match a different identicon, which was previously visible on meta, on the main site as well.
    – hyper-neutrino
    Commented Jul 19, 2021 at 20:28
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    Here is an image of the bug @hyper-neutrino mentioned. The blue one is my usual identicon, while this green-yellow one is new. The odd thing is that I signed up in 2019, so the salting thingy should have been implemented already, and I shouldn't need a new identicon.
    – user
    Commented Jul 19, 2021 at 20:57
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    @user looking into it, fix should be there shortly
    – Dean Ward
    Commented Jul 20, 2021 at 12:09
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    @user apologies for the delay, this should be back to its previous state now.
    – Dean Ward
    Commented Jul 20, 2021 at 15:51
  • @DeanWard It is, thanks!
    – user
    Commented Jul 20, 2021 at 15:51
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    @DeanWard - as of right now, I still show different icons on the main/meta sites I visit (tested Physics and Chemistry).
    – Jon Custer
    Commented Jul 21, 2021 at 12:43
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    You're not alone (a dupe from a couple of minutes ago.) @JonCuster
    – W.O.
    Commented Jul 22, 2021 at 6:55
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    @ARogueAnt. - I'm starting to get a Dr. Jekyll and Mr. Hyde vibe now, switching from main to meta sites...
    – Jon Custer
    Commented Jul 22, 2021 at 12:57
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    Should this still be status-planned, or is this now resolved network-wide?
    – Aaron Miller
    Commented Aug 18, 2021 at 0:33
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    @AaronMiller it’s resolved - changed to status-completed. Thanks for the poke!
    – Dean Ward
    Commented Aug 18, 2021 at 8:13

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