MonsterID is a method to generate a unique monster image based upon a certain identifier (IP address, email address, whatever). It can be used to automatically provide personal avatar images in blog comments or other community services.

The download contains a PHP file which will generate a random monster by default. When given a seed request parameter the monster will be based on this parameter and will always be the same for the same parameter. A second optional parameter named size can be given to get a resized image.

The script and the body part images are licensed under the Creative Commons Attribution 2.5 License license. When using it, please link back to this page somewhere (post in your blog, mention it in the footer, whatever – a single link per domain is fine).

Some more info on how it all started is available at MonsterID as Gravatar Fallback.

Download:

• monsterid.tgz (last update 2007-01-21)

Changes:

• 2007-01-21 – added some more body and eye parts, select random body color
• 2007-01-20 – initial release

MonsterID and variants are used at quite a few other places already. Here is a list of related sites that might be interesting to you:

• Scott maintains a MonsterID Wordpress Plugin
• Foosel extended the Serendipity Gravatar system to add MonsterID
• idproxy is a Yahoo account to OpenID system that uses MonsterID as anti phishing system
• ScrewYouHippy uses the MonsterID script to build a daily “bloke”
• Marko Mrdjenovič created a MonsterID webservice
• Мутанты из OpenID shows a Python implementation of MonsterID with quite excellent graphics (Russian article)
• The book review site Revish uses MonsterID for user avatars
• Alexander Schuc wrote an ASP.net implementation
• Gravatar now supports MonsterID out of the box