In my Google Reader account I have a few blogs that use the Gravatar icon linking in the comments section. Today I have finally fully decided that I will never (unless something changes) add these to my blog. For weeks now I have been noticing that blogs are loading very slowly and sometimes the comments are really messed up looking. A quick glance at the status bar informs me that I am waiting on www.gravatar.com to fill in the icons on each comment. Sometimes they would appear but lately they are failing and instead loading the alt text for the icon which looks stupid.

Quite a few bloggers that used to use gravatars like Veerle Pieters and Roger Johansson have now turned them off due to the issues. I’m not sure if the issue is with bandwidth or misconfiguration but hopefully they will fix it before people completely abandon them because the idea is great.