During the recent weeks so called Gravatar service was in the focus of many blogs, both Bulgarian and foreign ones. The fuss around this new cool stuff was great, and as a direct result today Gravatar serves more than 756 Milion global avatars (and counting)! If you want to know what Gravatar is, you can either look at Yovko’s blog (in Bulgarian), or Gravatar::About (in English).

But unfortunately for me, I was unable to register my own gravatar for a long time. I was quite mad, since I was feeling it’s very unfair to me. And since it was not working only for the emails, which belong to my own domain […@doncho.net], I was even feeling it too personal!

Gravatar’s site behaviour was strange: If I try to register a gravatar with an email, which belongs to my domain doncho.net, Gravatar was responding that it has sent a confirmation mail and I should click the link in that mail in order to activate my account. But… nothing like that happened – I never received such email and respectively I was never able to register such email. Since all my correspondence goes through this domain, I was quite mad! Finally I ended up with only my g-mail registered in Gravatar service.

At the end I realized that without external help my gravatar mission would be a great failure. But I was thinking:

> Come on, this service already has 750 Million subscribers, do you really think that someone can take personal care for you? And also – it’s free?
> Naaah, that will never ever happen, I should not bother writing at all

These were my thoughts. But as I already mentioned, I was despered for Gravatar. So I decided to write.

Finding an email was not an easy task, but I finally succeeded. I used both ways: a message to the administrator of Gravatar’s forum and their support forum to post about my problem.

I got my answer on the same day! This Great Guy, Tom Werner, had some time to look at my desperate call for help, and he activated my “stalled” account. The email sending problem is most probably still standing, but I finally have an active gravatar, which is associated with the email address in doncho.net domain.

Tom also helped me with another (quite stupid) move. When I was registering in the Gravatar’s forum, I used my whole gmail as login name! Stupid, very stupid! I realized how stupid I was immediately after I finished my registration ;), which made my stupidity permanent, except if an admin does not help. As you know, forum login names are [the only] permanent thing, which you cannot easily change. And since I made at least one post, it was just a question of time SPAM robots to harvest my email and to start sending me even more spam. Sick!

So I had to use Tom’s help again. It was quite a shame for an experienced Internet used (as I think I am) to describe such lame behaviour, but I needed some help. It’s just like in the doctor’s office: you say everything so the doctor can give you the best treatment.

So I did, and so Tom did. In few hours this last nasty error of mine was resolved.

Thanks again, Tom! You have my (thumbs up) for you and your service! Keep up the good work, and give us G2 as soon as it gets ready to hit the streets ;).