Improving blurry avatars

[#1]

While we all wait for high-dpi avatar support, there's a quick fix you can do to serve higher quality avatars at least in certain areas of the product such as the comments, and user fields of the issue field--I find it makes things look a lot better.

This trick does require a proxy such as nginx.

Basically, when you are asked to serve a small/xsmall, just strip out that parameter. Here's an nginx example:

location /secure/useravatar {
  proxy_pass http://localhost:8080;

  # we will specify our own caching on these images; limited to 30 days in case we need to revert the changes in future 
  proxy_hide_header Cache-Control;
  add_header Cache-Control "private, max-age=2592000";

  # this basically strips out the size small/xsmall from the request
  if ($request_uri ~ "/secure/useravatar\?size=x?small&(.*)") {
    set $remaining_args $1;
    set $args "";
    rewrite "/secure/useravatar" /secure/useravatar?$remaining_args break;
  }
}

The default cache-control caches for a long time. I modified to a shorter period just to be safe (in case there were some place in Jira where the rendering would look bad).

Been using it for almost a year now with no problems. Let me know if you decide to test it out.

Here's a screenshot before / after.

[Matt Doar__ LinkedIn]

Neat!

[Gonchik Tsymzhitov]

Great!