SourceTree is making outgoing tcp connections

[James Finn]

SourceTree is making outgoing tcp connection requests to www.gravatar.com and to other domains. Why? How can this be disabled? I have disabled automatic update checks, so there is no reason this program should be initiating outgoing connections at all.

[James Finn · Accepted solution]

Understood but don't like. No reason connections to Gravatar can't be an option in Preferences for those who want it, or at least something to uncheck for those who don't.

An undocumented phone home "every 12 hours" is a corrupt practice and I've disabled it through a firewall. "for emergencies" is suspect but I certainly believe you "measure SourceTree usage".

The only reason I am posting this is the annoying email I just got saying I had to resolve the question, which, as far as I remember, was not on the list of reasons I would get email when I subscribed to comments on the question.

Very nice application. Nice that it's free. But attitude towards customers as crops to harvest not so much.

[joshua-golub]

There is an option for this (at least nowadays): Tools/Options/General - Load avatar images from gravatar.com FYI.

[stevestreeting]

Gravatar is used to display user icons on commits. This is pretty universal in hg/git clients these days.

[James Finn]

Thanks.

It's also trying to connect to href="http://www.sourcetreeapp.com,%20">www.sourcetreeapp.com, doing that at random moments, like when I'm not even working with the application but I left it running in the background.

Even for the icons, the application is already 61MB, so is there any reason it can't store a small icon locally and has to fetch it remotely? Don't understand the design philosophy here.

[stevestreeting]

The way gravatar works is that you can set up your own personal image (like Twitter, Facebook etc) so that whenever a gravatar-enabled service looks up your email (in this case, the committer/author), you get the personalised image. This is nice for recognition purposes. If you don't have a gravatar image, then you get the standard procedural image. In fact, this very website gets the avatar images from gravatar, that's why mine is a picture of me and yours is a procedural shape :) There is some cacheing done in fact, so it isn't retrieved every time.

About the connection to sourcetreeapp.com, it shouldn't do that any more often than every 12 hours. It's 2 things - a check for any emergency news (e.g. if there was a security issue, major crash bug or something that we really had to let you know about), and a way to measure SourceTree usage. There's no data in it, just a random number, but it's used to measure how much ST is getting used out there, which helps Atlassian justify continuing to invest in the development (since it's a free tool).

[Sergey Gradovich]

How to force update an avatar from gravatar.com? I set new avatar at gravatar.combut it still 'default' in SourceTreeApp...