Idea: Show random skin instead of steve when rate limited

[connor4312]

Sometimes showing a "steve skin" is unavoidable due to rate limiting and such... What about, rather than showing a steve, show a random skin stored in the cache? This would make temporary unavailability less noticeable and provide the aesthetic functionality which minotar is often used for.

[LukeHandle]

A pretty interesting idea. I think it would probably draw attention away from the issue - which would be good.

Slight potential for an inappropriate skin popping up which might be bad...

We would need to adjust caching headers to prevent upstream Varnish/Nginx/Browser keeping them too long - we should probably already do this when we return chars :)

[connor4312]

mhm. What might work is to make some hash (Adler is fast to compute) of the username and have 100 built-in usernames. Map the first/last two digits in the adler hash of the username to the built-in avatars. So that way each person would have a "consistent" picture, and we could serve even when Minecraft's texture servers are completely unavailable (due to outages, for example).

[gumptionthomas]

I am not a fan of this idea. I'm already anticipating the support calls I'll get from confused users when they get someone else's random skin. Our users have already been conditioned that getting a steve is a temporary condition.

[lenovouser]

You could provide a config option to enable or disable this feature. Because I personally think this is a good idea.

[Foxtrek64]

Seeing this is still open, I thought I'd throw in my two cents. What if instead of picking a random skin across all of everyone, we instead grabbed Mojang staff skins (Notch, Jeb_, etc.) and displayed a random from this pool?

This would still give us the randomization we're looking for while also cutting out the issue of random inappropriate skins. Also, the skins are immediately recognizable in most cases, so I think it would be fairly easily to document the fact that "if you get a Mojang staff-member skin, there was probably a temporary issue with the service." This alone could lead to fewer heat tickets, which @gumptionthomas is rightly concerned for. Plus, with the small pool size, it wouldn't be too hard to include these skins (along with Steve/Alex) in a directory on-server, giving us instant access to them.

@lenovouser brings up a good point about having this toggleable - use Steve/Alex or use random skins from the pool. We may also be able to include functionality for users running their own imgd servers to place their own skin files within the directory mentioned above, in case they want to display a custom skin on error.

[MisterFixx]

I aupport with @Foxtrek64 suggestions.