I have been working with the team for quite a while regarding the profile area. Allow me to bring some clarity to the major issues so you can all know what is going on, what the behavior is and what is being done about it (currently).
The User avatar was first introduced to
www.dotnetnuke.com late last year by myself and Chris Paterra. Rather than build it into a forum feature, we opted to add it as a profile property, which we knew would be the longer term direction. We created a control for adding a profile avatar and retooled the forums to take advantage of it, which I
blogged about in January.
In 5.3, a core supported photo profile property was introduced and we migrated to it with the our upgrade to 5.4. The new profile property takes advantage of the User Folders functionality which did not exist at that time. We did a manual data conversion, moving all the existing information to the new file and database structures and tweaked our forum implementation to use the new control.
In the process of converting and subsequent usage... we've discovered some bugs in the implementation of the control. We've also discovered (and worked around) some performance implications with particular usage which, together, account for the behavior you are seeing.
There are several Gemini issues on this and related topics... and I will be entering a few more.
http://support.dotnetnuke.com/issue/V...
http://support.dotnetnuke.com/issue/V...
http://support.dotnetnuke.com/issue/V...
But the two things which you are seeing most are:
1) A missing permission on User Folders which limits view of the photo property file to only the original user and a host -AND-
2) A workaround implemented in forum / community teams, etc. which does not rely on the core method to retrieve the file (for performance purposes). The downside of the workaround is that it is cached and does not pick up on data changes until the site is refreshed (forum will update its cache the forum profile is updated).
So we're working with the Products and Engineering teams to identify and resolve all of these issues. I believe that some of them are in fact resolved in 5.4.3, despiste these particular gemini issues not being closed. But we will likely have to wait for 5.5 to see all of them finished.
Hope that helps.
Scott