Avatars

[mwardncsu]

What's an Avatar? It's that little picture that shows up on the left-hand side of the board below your user name.

How can you get one?

• Well, look up at the top of the board and you'll see a little page looking icon with the word "profile" next to it - click on that.
  
  
• This takes you to your profile page. Up near the top there is a "Modify Profile" link. Click on that.
  
  
• Scroll down to the "Personal Information" section.
  
  
• You can pick one of the "canned" avatars by selecting the pull down box by the word "Avatar", and select one of these - but don't do that, that's un-cool
  
  
• The better way is to go to the Avatar URL field - in this, put the link to your Avatar picture from somewhere like Photobucket. IMPORTANT - unlike when you link pics in the forums and you use the Image tags, here you just put the filename link... no tags.... it will start with http: and end with .jpg or .gif. In Photobucket, when you bring up the section with the various types of links, its the "Direct Link" that you want.
  
  
• Now, the tricky area..... it seems that the images can only be a maximum of 100x100 pixels. There may be some magic that can be done to make this bigger that we can look into later, but for now, let's live with it. The easiest and best thing to do here is to resize your avatar image to fit the 100x100 - you can crop it to be 100x100, or resize it. It does not HAVE to be 100x100 - it can be 40x100 or 100x73, etc. If probably want to preserve the aspect ratio by putting in the right size - else you're gonna look squashed and fat (oh, that's how you normally look? )
  
  
• Scroll all the way down and click "Modify Profile". That should be it.
  
  

If you're having issues, don't hesitate to reach out to one of the Moderators and we can help you get the settings right, convert an image for you, etc....