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I don't know when this started, but now, when I go to edit my profile and look at the "Change Picture" menu, the identicon item's image is different than the identicon I actually get when I select that item. The identicon I actually get is just the same one I have always had since the beginning. It's the "Change Picture" menu's identicon that's changed. I haven't changed my account email. I did add another login method recently, but I thought that isn't related to the identicon.

Here's my "real" identicon image:
my "real" identicon image

And here's the one that shows in the "Change Picture" menu:
the identicon image that shows in the "Change Picture" menu

I noticed this yesterday.

Why is this happening? Is it a bug? Should I blame caching? (If so, why/how?)

I tried to look for a duplicate question / if a duplicate question existed searching is:q identicon -[discussion] -[feature-request] -gravatar, but didn't see anything that looked the same.

I did see Why is my profile image different? (2016-08-20), but my user account didn't even exist back then.

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  • Different email hash, but we can't know if the bug is on SE side or Gravatar side. You probably have several emails attached to your Gravatar account.
    – Shadow Wizard Is Sad And Angry
    Jan 24 at 9:10

2 Answers 2

Reset to default
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According to the answer in Unexpectedly changing identicon, this might not be a bug:

This is the default for new users, and for existing users a salt is added as soon as they change their picture and select identicon.

I've added emphasis around the relevant part: when you select identicon option, the system is changing the email hash on purpose (aka "adding salt") due to security concerns, hence resulting in a different final image.

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  • Hmm. My oldest network account didn't even exist when the salt started being added, and this only started for me recently (see the question post).
    – starball
    Jan 30 at 20:29
  • As far as I know, it's added on the fly.
    – Shadow Wizard Is Sad And Angry
    Jan 31 at 9:51
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I thought it was related to changing your credentials, as they announced in 2021 that changing your email will affect your gravatar. However…

Here's what I see on my account:

brown identicon option

As you can see, the identicon I'm offered is not either of the ones I had in 2016 but a new brown one. (On Area51, my profile image is still the blue one I had in late 2016.) This is because it's using a new gravatar link and not the old one.

I double checked and I haven't ever changed my email. It is just spontaneously different.

This seems to be most similar to when SE first started adding salts in 2013 (before my time).

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