Avatar Tutorial

What is an avatar? How do I use it?
<< That's an avatar.

Ignore all you've learned about Hindu mythology! An avatar is a graphic that you use to represent yourself. You can chose an avatar by editing your profile (it's on a link at the top of every forum page).
How to select an avatar.

1. At the top of the forum pages there is a link to "Profile". Click it to edit your profile (where you will add an avatar).
   
2. Scroll to the bottom of the profile edit page and click "show gallery"
   
3. Choose an avatar
   
4. Now, at the bottom of the edit profile page you press submit.
   

Make sure you do that last step as many times people neglect that final one.

And you have yourself an avatar.


BELOW ARE ADVANCED OPTIONS (that anyone can do if they have the patience to learn).
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Using a Custom Avatar

Ok, now you know about avatars but you want your very OWN avatar? No problem. You can use an image of your choosing as your avatar.

To do this you need to chose or make an image you want to use as an avatar. Once you have chosen the image and have it on your hard drive do the following.

1. At the top of the forum pages there is a link to "Profile". Click it to edit your profile (where you will add an avatar).
   
2. At the bottom of the page you will find an option to "Upload Avatar from your machine" and you can type the file name in or click "browse" to locate and select the image from your computer.
   
3. Alternately you can have the forum fetch the file from a remote URL.
   
4. Now, at the bottom of the edit profile page you press submit.
   

Note: The width can be no greater than 90 pixels, a height no greater than 100 pixels and a file size no more than 6kB. This is to ensure that the pages load and display swiftly and correctly for other users.

How to make your own avatar A Paint tutorial.

If you want to create your own avatar this is how you do it (using Paint, a very common and simple program).

1) Open the image you want to turn into an avatar in Paint (this program can usually be found in windows in the accessories folder).

2) You can cut up the picture by dragging the box over it this will select the area you want for your avatar. Then right click on the area you cut out and select "copy to" and choose a file name. This will save the selected portion of the picture to a new file.

Resizing / Shrinking an image.

Alternatively you might want to use the whole picture and simply shrink it down. This is done by:

Clicking Image in the menu, then stretch/skew (the shortcut to this option should be Ctrl W). There you can reduce the image using a percent value. Make sure to shrink both hight and width by the same amount or you will have a distorted image. If you want to check the hight and width of the avatar to make sure it's under 80 by 80 go to Image > Attributes (shortcut Ctrl E) and you can view the pixel width and hieght there.

When you are done you should save your image by selecting "save as" and make sure to choose the file format of gif or jpeg.

Then you are almost done.

You might need to shrink the filesize of the image. This is different from thesize of the image, a small but high quality image can have a large file size. There is a limit for file size because avatars slow down dialup users if they are too big.

To compress your images without having any software for image manipulation you can use these sites:

Here are compressors for gifs and jpegs:

http://www.savei.net/gifcruncher.html << for gifs (allows uploads)

http://www.chami.com/jc/ << for jpegs (note that you'll have to put the image online first to use this, the gif cruncher can work with an image from your hard drive).

Alternatively you can just say pretty please and someone (I'll do it if I have the time) will probably be able to do it for you.

Note that viewing the gallery will delete any uploaded avatars. This is not a bug but works this way to avoid members uploading many unused avatars. So once you upload an avatar don't mess with avatars unless you want to replace it.
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If you need any help whatsoever in selecting an avatar please post here.

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Edit- Intructions on uploaded avatars restored as that feature has been reinstated.

Go to your profile and click on Browse, which is to the right of "Upload Avatar from your machine". This opens up a window to explore your computer. Just locate the picture that you want and click "Open". That window will disappear and you are left with your profile page. You'll notice there is now information in the white rectangle next to "Upload Avatar from your machine". Click "Submit" and you're done.

If it doesn't work, go back to your profile and delete your old avatar before following the above instructions.

- signed, jespah