[HOLD for payment 2024-06-06] [HOLD for payment 2024-05-03] Use Fallback Avatar Pattern for Unknown Users

[grgia]

Background

Slack convo: https://expensify.slack.com/archives/C036QM0SLJK/p1710942820060629

Colorful / Default Avatars

Fallback Avatar

Problem

We have a lot of issues surrounding avatar behavior. Some of this is due to how we originally designed the Default Avatar logic, which used a user's login to calculate. This meant that a default avatar could be correctly guessed for any user. However, due to email and privacy concerns, we changed this logic to use the accountID.

Now, any optimistic account ID that is later replaced results in a mismatch of avatars. This has caused a group of bugs all with the same RCA.

Solution

Using the color default avatars as a placeholder avatar causes confusion, so let's stop using them as defaults for users we don't know. From now on, let's always use the fall back avatar. We should be storing the default avatars the same way we store a user-uploaded avatar. So we should stop optimistically setting avatars for users that you don't have in ONYX.

Rules for Avatars

From now on, we want to treat avatars as the following:

• Colorful default avatars are considered assigned avatars and should be treated the same as when a user has a custom uploaded avatar
• Fallback avatars are used whenever a user’s accountID is unknown or when there’s a problem fetching the avatar (isOffline)
• You’ll only see avatars for users you have in ONYX

Issue Owner

Current Issue Owner: @puneetlath

[hayes102]

Hello @grgia is this issue open for proposals ?

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[grgia]

@hayes102 I'm waiting to hear back from someone at one of our agencies about this.

#38674

For context, I started working on this in this PR- I have the search bar working with this pattern, but there's some funkiness around money request search options or chatting a new user, so I am planning to take those changes out for now and have this PR only add the theme support and tackle those changes with this issue. That said, we will begin taking proposals by tomorrow if the issue is not taken by SWM.

[Kicu]

hey I work for SWM and would like to work on this one

[grgia]

@Kicu I removed the fallback changes I made in the PR- 44dc9fc

see this commit for the search, as well as this thread:

#38674 (comment)

[Kicu]

Thank you @grgia I will be working on this today