Default Avatars for Disqus sites is now available (again), and more

A few days ago I wrote about the moderation panel being updated with new settings and so on, but in today's post I'll touch on a few things that was not fixed, and a new feature that was not discussed in the other article.

Default Avatars -- affects Classic and the 2012 versions of Disqus
Default avatars are now able to be set again in the the admin panel. Previously a Disqus backend update prevented them from being updated. Some users report that they never lost their default avatar for their website, but Techman's World was affected and did lose its default avatar. To set the avatar again, go to Admin >> Settings >> Advanced, and the avatar setting should be the first section of the panel.

However, despite the re-adding of the feature there is still an issue when trying to upload photos with transparent photos. Transparent photos will have the transparent areas replaced with black backgrounds, which does affect the Techman's World avatar a lot because the background is transparent so it can blend in on just about every background color. You can see so for yourself to the right. This is the current default avatar for Techman's World, set via the Disqus admin panel. I did chat with the Disqus support team (specifically Tyler) about this, and they said that support for transparent avatars will be added in the future. Hope the feature comes along faster.

Timestamps -- Affects Disqus 2012 only
Disqus has released an update to the new Disqus that has the absolute time of a posted comment be available via a HTML title popup. Currently there is no way to unset this. In my opinion, I think that there should be a setting allowed to control this. An absolute time stamp is one that includes the exact date and time you posted a comment. Relative time stamps is time stamps that include relative time, such as "4 hours ago" for a comment that was posted around 4 hours ago.

The updates are live right now, so feel free to play around with the settings by going to your Disqus admin panel.