no issue
- preperation for User model refactoring
- the rule is:
--> when calling a unit, this unit should return something new
--> and NOT modifying an existing object and return it (this is an unexpected behaviour, especially for utils and libs)
closes#6629
- i had the case that in gravatar process.env.NODE_ENV was undefined and indexOf of undefined crashe my application
- so always use config to read current env
no issue
- request is quite a heavy dependency
- we were only using request in 3 places: a test, storing contrib images in the gruntfile & the gravatar lookup
- all 3 are relatively simple to do with the http/https module
- refactored all 3, removed request
