Why do some users have a dotted border?

Question

I noticed this:

As you can see, some users have a dotted border around their profile picture. I recently changed my profile picture, but Renan didn't, as far as I know. This really isn't something on the picture, I checked, it's in the stylesheet of the website (see below).

I can't find a logic in who has the border and who hasn't. It's the same all the time though.

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Users with a dotted border have a somewhat malformed profile page: the user's info starts below the image. Have a look at my profile for example.

This has been fixed. The dotted borders still appear though.

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More users: I rakshith, Nick Rosencrantz, Jeremy Tunnell, angelatlarge, Tom L., Brian Drummond (after he changed his avatar, I believe)

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This is EE-specific. I can't find any picture on WordPress Answers or TeX with the dotted border.

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I took a look at the HTML, and found that the users with dotted border are in a <div> with class gravatar-wrapper-32. The other users are in a <div> with no class at all. The CSS (border: 1px dotted rgb(195, 181, 156);) is linked to the class gravatar-wrapper-32.

Answer 1

That's why - see the border rule?

.gravatar-wrapper-32 {
    background: none repeat scroll 0 0 #EEEEEE;
    border: 1px dotted #BBBBBB;
    height: 32px;
    overflow: hidden;
    padding: 0;
    text-align: center;
    width: 32px;
}

Answer 2

A temporary solution is to add a UserScript to your browser, like this:

// ==UserScript==
// @name        Remove dotted border on EE.SE
// @namespace   http://*electronics.stackexchange.com/*
// @version     1.0
// @include     http://*electronics.stackexchange.com/*
// ==/UserScript==

// .gravatar-wrapper-32 is for small pictures like under a question / answer
// .gravatar-wrapper-48 is for somewhat bigger pictures like on the users list
// .gravatar-wrapper-128 is for the profile picture
$('.gravatar-wrapper-32, .gravatar-wrapper-48, .gravatar-wrapper-128').css({
    border: '0'
});

Answer 3

This is a wild guess. I notice that the pictures with borders seem to have some sharpening applied to the small versions. Since you upload a single larger size picture, SE (or that silly gravater service they use) must be doing the sharpening. My guess is that what appears as a dotted line is a artifact of the sharpening algorithm that has a problem dealing with the edges of pictures. Uploaded pictures can themselves often have a unintended one-pixel border, which together with a sloppily written sharpening algorithm could make a mess.

Could be a feature though, I don't really know. Perhaps they are planning to celebrate SE on postage stamps.