You are currently viewing Integrating Gravatar and Anonymizing Email Address in Feedback Section

Integrating Gravatar and Anonymizing Email Address in Feedback Section

SUSI skills are having a very nice feedback system that allows the user to rate skills from 1-star to 5-star and showing ratings in skills screens. SUSI also allow the user to post feedback about skills and display them. You can check out how posting feedback implemented here and how displaying feedback feature implemented here. To enhance the user experience, we are adding user gravatar in the feedback section and to respect user privacy, we are anonymizing the user email displayed in the feedback section. In this post, we will see how these features implemented in SUSI iOS.

Integrating Gravatar –

We are showing gravatar of the user before feedback. Gravatar is a service for providing globally-unique avatars. We are using user email address to get the gravatar. The most basic gravatar image request URL looks like this:

https://www.gravatar.com/avatar/HASH

where HASH is replaced with the calculated hash for the specific email address we are requesting. We are using the MD5 hash function to hash the user’s email address.

The MD5 hashing algorithm is a one-way cryptographic function that accepts a message of any length as input and returns as output a fixed-length digest value to be used for authenticating the original message.

In SUSI iOS, we have MD5Digest.swift file that gives the hash value of email string. We are using the following method to set gravatar:

if let userEmail = feedback?.email {
setGravatar(from: userEmail)
}
func setGravatar(from emailString: String) {
let baseGravatarURL = "https://www.gravatar.com/avatar/"
let emailMD5 = emailString.utf8.md5.rawValue
let imageString = baseGravatarURL + emailMD5 + ".jpg"
let imageURL = URL(string: imageString)
gravatarImageView.kf.setImage(with: imageURL)
}

Anonymizing User’s Email Address –

Before the implementation of this feature, the user’s full email address was displayed in the feedback section and see all review screen. To respect the privacy of the user, we are now only showing user email until the `@` sign.

In Feedback object, we have the email address string that we modify to show until `@` sign by following way:

if let userEmail = feedback?.email, let emailIndex = userEmail.range(of: "@")?.upperBound {
userEmailLabel.text = String(userEmail.prefix(upTo: emailIndex)) + "..."
}

 

Final Output –

Resources –

  1. Post feedback for SUSI Skills in SUSI iOS
  2. Displaying Skills Feedback on SUSI iOS
  3. What is MD5?

Jogendra Kumar

Jogendra is pre-final year student at Indian Institute of Technology (BHU) Varanasi. He is an iOS Developer and an active Open Source contributor, also have experience in developing Android, Web and Windows Apps. Currently, he is focusing on Machine Learning and Blockchain Technology. Apart from Coding, he loves coffee, going hackathons, attending conferences, and traveling. You can find him on twitter here https://twitter.com/imjog24

Leave a Reply

This site uses Akismet to reduce spam. Learn how your comment data is processed.