I've seen several versions of this question:
How do I make a nifty personalized avatar?And there are a few answers. First, the forums do not allow you to display a personalized avatar until you have at least 100 posts under your belt, although if you have at least 10 you should be able to use one of a few forum provided avatars. Skip down to the "Adding your new avatar to your profile" below to see how to do this. Hitting the 100 post milestone isn't hard if you spend a little time socializing in the "
Bar" which is a very informal section of the forums with topics that get deleted after only 2 weeks. It ends up serving as a glorified chat room.
Ok, got your 100 posts now and you have a nifty picture you would like to use as an avatar but don't know the best way to go about using it?
Host your chosen avatar: (I'll try to be pretty basic with the below instructions, so some steps might be more in depth than necessary for some people)
First you have to have your picture on the internet somewhere. It is recommend that you "host" it somewhere rather than use an image from wherever you find it because otherwise each time someone sees your avatar, that is using a tiny piece of the bandwidth of wherever your picture is hosted. After the bazillienth time someone on the forum has seen your avatar that might add up to a pain for that random place on the interwebs. There are several "photo sharing" websites out there that are free and really easy to use for something like this. I recommend
photobucket.
After you have gone through photobucket's simple and rather standard registration process, you will need to upload your photo to your new photobucket account (if it is an image you found on the internet somewhere, you might have to save it to your hard drive somewhere first. To do that, right click on the image and select "save image." Remember where you saved it so you can find it later to upload to Photobucket.) If you are logged into Photobucket, there should be an orange
[Upload] button near the center of the screen, click this.
If you have a window open where you saved your image, you can actually drag and drop the file into the box that shows up on photobucket's upload page. If you don't want to do this, a less intrinsic way to do it is to click the "chose photos & videos" button, which allows you to select the file that way.
Sizing your photoPer
the forum rules A forum avatar must avoid must avoid "
touchy topics" and must be a size not exceeding 150 x 150 pixels. The sizing requirement is because overly large avatars can adversely affect the viewing experience of some forum members.
So now that you have uploaded your photo photobucket has some easy to use photo editing features that you can use to size it properly right from their website. My avatars are rarely a perfect square, I tend to prefer an avatar that is taller than it is wide, but you can use any aspect ratio you want as long as it isn't over 150 x 150. Since this isn't a very large area to work with, if you need to size down your image, I suggest first cropping down your image to only the bare essentials before doing any shrinking. This is done on photobucket by selecting the crop button and dragging the new round corner buttons to outline the portions of the image you wish to keep. Once done click "Apply"
Now that you have your image cropped, click the "resize" button. Photobucket will display the current "pixel" dimensions of your image. If one (or both) of these dimensions is greater than 150, change the highest dimension to 150 and select "apply" Now click save, and I suggest saving a new title for this photo (click the text that says "click to add a new title" below the image).
Adding your new avatar to your profileOk now that you have hosted your new avatar, you need to add it to your profile so that everyone else sees it when you post.
- Bring your mouse over the "Profile" button near the top of the Dresden Files forum page.
- While hovering over the button, three options should appear. Select "forum profile."
The first thing here corresponds to your profile. This is where if you only have 10 posts (and even if you have a bazillion) you can select one of many forum provided avatar options. - Select the option "Specify avatar by URL." In the text box that appears is where you place the URL for the image you hosted on photobucket.
- To get this URL, go back to the image on your photobucket profile and select the get link button (looks like 2 links of a chain positioned diagonally) the link code you want for this application is the "direct link." Clicking on the "direct link" text box in photobucket will automatically copy that code to your clip board.
- Back on your forum profile page, paste the "direct link" in the text box mentioned earlier in step 3 (right click in the box and select "paste"
- Press the "Change Profile" button at the bottom right of your profile page.
- Go and look at any post you have made to make sure you got the results you wanted
