Avatars are small pictures which are associated with a player. Yucata.de is showing these pictures in many locations: the player list, player info, discussion board, in popups, the page header and so on. Normally, avatars have a high recognition value.

Yucata doesn't allow you uploading your own picture. Instead, yucata.de is relying on the service of Gravatar. You can register with Gravatar and then associate a picture with your email address. For players who didn't register with Gravatar, there are several algorithms like identicon, monsterid, wavatar or retro to generate a picture based on the mail address. The examples have been generated for the address [email protected]

If you are not a Gravatar user you may choose in your profile here on yucata.de which algorithm shall be used to generate an avatar for you. If you don't like any of these pictures you can try to alter the capitalization of your email address. Every changed character will change the picture.

The special thing about Gravatar is that many discussion boards and blogs are using it. So, you register once with Gravatar and from then on you'll have your picture in many places on the web as long as you use the same email address.

You might have some privacy concerns when using Gravatar. When you registered with them you took a choice but what about all the yucata players who are not members of Gravatar and still get images generated by Gravatar based on their email address? Is yucata.de distributing personal information?

No, it doesn't. Yucata doesn't send your email address to Gravatar but a so-called 'hash' of your email address. We are using a certain cryptographic algorithm to generate this hash. This algorithm is transforming '[email protected]' to '010ef7e2cb4d30206ddbb7f396be7812'. The algorithm is constructed in a way that it is irreversible. If you have the hash, you can't find out at all what it was generated from. Already small changes to the email address lead to completely different hashes. This addresses the biggest privacy concern.

But still, if you are not registering with Gravatar but are using many places on the web with the same email address, a program might be able to find all these places by using an image search. If you then publish personal information in one place, that program might be able to build a profile of your web usage. It is up to you if you consider this a really risk or a breach of privacy.

One workaround is to use the same email address but to capitalize it differently on different sites. Using only the hash values, nobody is able to tell that '[email protected]' and '[email protected]' are the same mail addresses.

But you can also completely opt out of the system. Yucata is offering a standard avatar. That is a picture on our servers. If you choose this option, nothing will be sent to Gravatar at all.