50

In my SO profile, you may see something odd: a peeking duck.

Peeking duck

I've just recently uploaded this new profile picture of mine. I checked it after the upload and everything's fine. After a few hours, I opened my profile and there it is, the duck has somehow become afraid of the people viewing it.

Is this a bug, a feature, or is it just the duck?

I am about to re-upload my profile pic, but I've decided to drop first this topic to meta.

And if you're curious, here is the original picture.

ADDITIONAL: I've used the non-gravatar way to upload the picture.

ADDITIONAL 2: The problem only shows in the profile view. No problem in chat, less info profile view, and in the questions and answers.

UPDATE: Re-uploaded picture. Status normal (for now, at least).

Improve this question
3
  • 3
    So, this has nothing to do with us - it's something that happens on Imgur's end. But we're not going to sit here and play tech support for them taking status tags on and off as it breaks and gets fixed over time - so this is now just a support question for users who encounter this and want to know how to fix it themselves.
    – animuson StaffMod
    Commented May 3, 2016 at 1:00
  • Thanks @animuson, bad news are better than no news. I have revamped my answer to reflect this.
    – Shadow Wizard
    Commented May 3, 2016 at 6:13
  • @animuson: Just out of curiosity, does SE actually ever relay these kinds of bug reports to imgur, or are individual users just supposed to find some way to report them to imgur directly? (I, for one, have no idea how I might do that; I don't use imgur, I only use the SE image upload service that SE Inc. buys from them. Perhaps there should be a faq post about it?)
    – Ilmari Karonen
    Commented May 3, 2016 at 12:05

1 Answer 1

Reset to default
14

TL;DR; to fix it, you have to re-upload the picture again, which cause new thumbnail creation process.

When uploading a picture to SE, it is actually sent to imgur for hosting. While the original picture is saved, imgur also creates bunch of thumbnails, meaning smaller versions of the picture with fixed size, e.g. 32x32 or 48x48 pixels, which are used in various places and save lots of bandwidth.

Sometimes, something breaks when generating these thumbnails, however as animuson said in a comment, this is not a bug on Stack Exchange side, but rather on imgur side, and SE can't fix it.

Improve this answer
6
  • Another more recent example: meta.scifi.stackexchange.com/questions/7480/…
    – Rand al'Thor
    Commented Mar 14, 2016 at 14:58
  • Thanks @rand and congrats for becoming a mod! (never noticed before. :))
    – Shadow Wizard
    Commented Mar 14, 2016 at 15:12
  • Thanks! :-) Wow, you missed that fun? It was ... an extremely controversial election.
    – Rand al'Thor
    Commented Mar 14, 2016 at 15:16
  • I only saw parts of what was going on here on MSE (including the chat room about you) and tried to stay away. Glad it's all sorted out by now. :-)
    – Shadow Wizard
    Commented Mar 14, 2016 at 15:17
  • Heh, I won't provide you with links to the controversy then ;-) (Btw, I'm surprised to see you're not a mod - I was sure you were, and almost said "see you in TL". Did you use to be one?)
    – Rand al'Thor
    Commented Mar 14, 2016 at 15:19
  • @rand not here, in a different place, years ago...
    – Shadow Wizard
    Commented Mar 14, 2016 at 15:24

You must log in to answer this question.

Not the answer you're looking for? Browse other questions tagged .