Welcome!

If you're reading this blog post, it probably means you've managed to log in to the new website. If you're reading this over someone else's shoulder and cursing the name of Forum 35 because you can't get into the system, ask your friend to hit the Contact Us link at the top of the page and let us know that Houston may have a problem.

Once you've logged in to the website as a member, the first thing you'll want to do is update your profile. On the right hand side of the login landing page, you’ll see a list of items under the "My Profile” label. Click on the link that says "Manage Profile”.

This link will take you to a page with a ton of options. Today’s post will deal with the Edit Bio link, so go ahead and click that one.

You should now be at a page that looks a little bit like a registration form. Before we get started, I want to address an important issue first. At this point, you may have a question about what personal information can be seen by the general public and other members. We’ve set the system up so that your personal information is fully protected from non-members. If you are not logged in as a member, you cannot search the site for Forum 35 members.

With respect to other Forum 35 members, you can control what they can see about your profile. You’ll see checkboxes to the left of some of the data fields on this page. If a field has a checkbox next to it, you can make it visible or invisible to other members by checking or un-checking each box respectively. One more time: check-mark to make it visible, no check-mark to make it invisible.

Account Information

Personalized URL: Currently, your personalized member page is tied to a back-end number that YourMembership assigned to you when we loaded your data into the system. You can change this to whatever alias you want, which will change the URL of your profile page.

Username: This can pretty much be whatever you want, just keep it classy if you know what I'm saying. You cannot use a username that someone else has already picked.

Password: Also up to you. If you click on the link, it will ask you to change your password, but will not show you your current one. The admins also cannot see your password.

Email Address: The email address to which you would like notifications and the Forum Flash sent. This is a required field, although you can control what notifications you receive. We’ll tackle that one in a later post.

Primary Group: You can’t change your Primary Group from this page, we’ll also get to that one in a later post.

Everything Else
The next series of data fields under the Personal Information, Additional Information, Contact Information, and Professional Information is pretty self-explanatory.

Do note that you need to set your gender. For some reason, the data upload didn’t properly transfer that particular data field over, so everyone is currently unassigned a gender, which defaults to Male.

Mugshot

The final thing you might want to take care of is your picture. The website uses the highly dubious term of "mugshot" for this item. Sure, it's a shot of your mug, but come on! I digress... To load an image of yourself to the website, click on the link entitled "Profile Home" under the "My Profile" label on the right-hand side of the screen. You should see a blank image in the upper left hand side of the main frame. Simply click in that box and you should see an icon pop-up allowing you to edit. Click on that, select a photo from your computer, and you're good to go. Same rules apply to your username, please try to keep it classy. We're not running ChatRoulette over here. 
 

Well, I hope that has answered any outstanding questions you may have concerning profile set-up. Next week we'll tackle the Notification settings. If you run into any problems, feel free to hit up the Forum 35 Web Team (web@forum35.org).

Take care!

J. Slater McKay
President-Elect, Forum 35