Broken Avatar after upgrade

[Arrekin]

I did a chain of upgrades from like 2.0.0 today(to 3.2), and during one of them, I'm not sure which, I got broken avatar. To be honest I'm not even sure how it looked before but not I have that very ugly 'couldn't load' image.

In the console, I see NS_ERROR_CONNECTION_REFSED on /avatar/xxxx call.

Everything else works fine. Any ideas what this is about?

[manimovassagh]

The broken avatar with NS_ERROR_CONNECTION_REFUSED on /avatar/xxxx calls is likely caused by the avatar service endpoint changing during the upgrade chain from v2.0 to v3.2.

A few things to check:

1. Verify your BASE_URL is correct

The NS_ERROR_CONNECTION_REFUSED error means the browser tried to connect to something that actively refused the connection. Look at the full URL in the browser's Network tab — if the avatar request is pointing to localhost or 127.0.0.1 instead of your actual domain, your BASE_URL env var is misconfigured.

# Make sure this matches your actual deployment URL including protocol BASE_URL=https://plausible.yourdomain.com

2. Check if the avatar route is proxied correctly

In v3.x, avatars may be served through a different path. If you're using a reverse proxy (Nginx/Caddy), make sure all paths are being forwarded, not just specific ones:

location / { proxy_pass http://plausible:8000; proxy_set_header Host $host; proxy_set_header X-Real-IP $remote_addr; proxy_set_header X-Forwarded-For $proxy_add_x_forwarded_for; proxy_set_header X-Forwarded-Proto $scheme; }

3. Try clearing stale assets

After jumping multiple major versions, stale cached assets can cause issues:

• Clear your browser cache or try incognito
• If using Docker: docker compose down && docker compose pull && docker compose up -d

4. Check if it's a Gravatar/external service issue

Plausible fetches avatars based on email hashes. If your instance can't reach external services (Gravatar), that could also cause this. Check if your server has outbound internet access.

If none of the above helps, check the Plausible server logs for errors around the time of the /avatar/xxxx request — that will tell you whether the route exists and what's failing server-side.