Avatars and Signatures

[Miro]

Since Miro has offered to make them, may as well inform people how to set them up

First off is knowing what those terms even mean in regards to message boards.  Your avatar is the image that shows up next to your posts, intended to represent you (hence the name "avatar" ).  Doesn't necessarily have to, but that was the idea behind it when it was created.  Your signature is the image and/or text that shows up below your posts.


Knowing what they are, you now have to figure out what you want in each place.  Avatars on this particular forum are 150px X 65px, so no matter what image you choose, it will be resized to fit those proportions, hence why some may appear stretched or smooshed.  It you want to avoid that, crop, resize, and/or otherwise edit the image yourself to be those dimensions for better image quality.  If you don't have the means, just try to find something as close to those proportions as possible to lessen the amount of distortion.

As far as I know, there is no particular size limit on this forum for signatures, but as a rule of thumb it's best to avoid anything over 800px in width and 500px in height.  As a personal preference, Miro tends to try to keep her signatures below 300px in height when at all possible.  Between 50px and 150px is ideal.  You don't want it too tall or you'll be that annoying person that makes everyone do a bunch of extra scrolling every time you post in a thread.  A signature that is too wide cannot be viewed fully without sideways scrolling, which most people won't want to bother with, and on some forums, it will actually stretch the page.  Miro is assuming almost no one uses 800 x 600 resolution anymore and has thus deemed it safe to use 800px signatures.  More than that, however, would be too wide for those using 1024 x 768 (as the forum needs extra space on both sides for consistent page layout).  If you want it to appear whole on your "Profile" page without side scrolling, the max width for that is 425px.

Once you've chosen your images, you'll need to upload them to an image hosting site such as ImageShack or Photobucket. (ImageShack I no longer find reliable as the site doesn't work on firefox and they apparently want people to pay for their services now)  Even if the image you want is something you found online and is thus already being hosted, it's best to save it to your computer and upload it to your own image host as you never know when it will be moved or deleted by the current owner.

The image host you upload to will give you a link to your image which you can then copy and paste elsewhere to show it off.  To show it off on this forum, click on the "Profile" tab at the top left of the page below the header.


Once on your profile page, there is a menu to the left.  Click on "Forum Profile Information"


Your avatar you'll enter into the "Personalized Picture" field.  Click the "I have my own pic" option and paste in the web address of your image.


Your signature will go into the signature field.  There's a limit to the amount of characters you can use for a signature so as not to have people writing entire novels to use as a signature, however this limit also applies to code and links, which is another good reason to have your own image host.  Some image links you will come across out there will have ridiculously long urls.  The ones you get from most image hosts will usually fall well within the character limit.  In the event you still have a monstrosity of a link, you can use a site such as TinyURL to shorten it.  

To get the image to appear correctly, you will have to put the url in BBCode image tags, which just means adding [ img ] [ /img ] (without the spaces) to the front and back of the link as you'll see below:


Then just click the "change profile" button at the bottom right and you're done.

[Scot]

Miro reads minds......... she knew that I was having issues getting my image posted! 

I see the wicked reason why....... having to host the picture from somewhere else!!

Bleh..... I do have a facebook/linkedin account, could I use that to "host" the pictures?

[Miro]

Yes, but they're not always reliable.  Sometimes it'll show up, sometimes it won't... at least that's what I've seen with others using their facebook.

If you're using firefox, right click on the image after you've uploaded it and select "copy image location" to get a direct link to the image.  Just copying the address at the top of the page probably won't work.

For internet explorer, right click, go to Properties, and copy the address from there.

Chrome: right click, select "copy image url"

[Miro]

So, something that those who don't have an image hosting account might take interest in:  you can sign into photobucket using your facebook, which I assume means you don't have to go through the steps of setting up an account with photobucket and can just use your facebook to utilize photobucket.  I haven't used that method myself so I don't know how it works.