Choosing Avatars

You an choose a picture to be displayed on all your posts to represent you -- this is called an "avatar".

You have to have that picture hosted on a server somewhere on the Net before you can use it as an avatar. Here is a Google search for places that will host your picture for free.

To set an avatar in your profile:

1. Click YOUR OTHER SETTINGS on the top-right text menu at the top of all pages.
   
   
2. On the subsequent Profile page, click FORUM PROFILE SETTINGS in the left-hand menu.
   
   
3. Click the radio-button beside I HAVE MY OWN PICTURE.
   
   
4. Type the URL of the picture in the slot beside it. This would be the full URL, beginning with "HTTP://" of the picture, wherever it is stored on the Net (see link to search for free picture hosts above).
   
5. Press [ENTER] (or click [SUBMIT] at the bottom of the page) to save this setting.

Troubleshooting:

If your avatar doesn't appear after following the above steps, most of the time the problem is either a mistyped URL for the picture, or that the server where your picture is hosted isn't allowing "hot-linking", which is when one website (like GI) tries to use pictures from another website for its own pages. This causes the second website to use its own bandwidth to serve pictures for someone else's website, and some sites don't allow this. If this is the case, you need to find another image host.

Test the URL of your picture by typing it directly into your browser's address bar and hit [ENTER] -- this should bring the image up alone right in your browser window. If it doesn't, then the URL is either wrong, or the server its on isn't allowing it to be displayed outside of its own pages, so again, you need to find another host.