Avatars and Signatures

Since we've made the move, you may wish to spruce up your avatars and user signatures, and other options. To get to these easily, go up toward the upper right side of your browser windows, and you will see your username with a small circled arrow; click that to get one-click access to many of your personalization options!

A couple of guidelines for you.

Avatars: the system will tell you a recommended avatar size. The default shape of the avatars here is square, so upload an appropriate image. After uploading, you will be able to drag a square shape over your image if it is rectangular, so you may highlight the appropriate part of your image. As always, keep it within our forum rules (family friendly; no politics, religion, etc.).

Signatures: one improvement the XenForo developers are working on is better control over signatures. Please follow the following guidelines for signatures: keep them short, maybe one or two lines, in normal or smaller font sizes. Do not use any images in signatures, although you may use a small non-animated smiley image from our system. Images in signatures will be removed immediately, as will any font sizes larger than post body text. We would like to keep signatures as distraction free as possible and, remember too, that your signature will only appear once on a page.

Other than that, you may post status messages to your profile, which will eventually be displayed in a couple of places in the forum. Also, tie your Facebook account to your A&M Corner forum login so you can "like" posts and share them with your FB friends. There are many social and personalization features here--have fun and make use of them!

You may want to go through all of the items in things like Preferences, Personal Details, Contact Details, etc, all found under your user name in the upper right corner. Click on that and you'll be able to adjust anything that didn't quite make it correctly.

For me that included: Time Zone. I was listed as UTC Dublin, London and had to adjust it to UTC -5 for Eastern Time US. This board should work with Daylight Saving Time automatically, so no more seasonal adjustments (YAY!)

My "location" had to be manually changed to "A&M Corner Southern Command in Sunny Central FL". It had some coding oddities around the ampersand and the word "Florida" didn't quite fit.

My email preference to receive automatic emails for subscribed threads was somehow deactivated. I had to check a box to re-activate it.

Harry

So far I like the look, but need to get used to boxes popping up everywhere my cursor goes. Ease of posting replies is VERY pleasing and effects like Bold, Italics, underline and (now) strike through are now easily accomplished without the need of putting html-like code in brackets!

Also, I noticed in the staff area the AOTW and SOTW images test topics are gone. Will they come back or are we just waiting for the image files to be relocated and then redirected?

Hey Bill--update your signature to point to the temporary IRS thingy (where the files have been all along): http://www.amcorner.com/irscorner . Maybe the search engines will pick up on that.

Speaking of search engines, I notice that Google searches on certain topics point to Corner Forum threads, but they must be the old forum's thread links. If you click on them, they take you to a "can't find" page on this new forum.

I suppose that as the Googlebots spider their way through this forum, they'll weed out and replace the old references and pick up the new ones.

Harry

That's right--it will take awhile. Since the thread and post ID numbers have changed, there is no way to rewrite those to the new forum. Actually, there is a way to do it, but it would be a lot more trouble than it is worth. We'll dip in the Google rankings a bit because of the change, but we will actually rebound higher since the forum layout is more search engine friendly.