Avatars
From the OGR Terms of Service "We encourage you to use an 'avatar' which is a small photo that will appear under your screen name on each of your posts. Please make sure that, if you choose use an avatar, your face appears in the photo. Please ensure that the photo is the same dimension horizontally and vertically (i.e., a square) and that it is no more than 50 pixels on a side. While you can link to a photo hosted elsewhere, we prefer that you upload your avatar photo to the Forum so that it is always available. Avatars that do not adhere to these standards will be deleted."
A couple of guidelines to to comply with the above rules
- Use a picture of you, not your favorite Rail Road emblem, engine or pet.
- Resize your image to 50 pixels by 50 pixels.
- Upload it locally, not on a host site
Preparing your avatar
Besides selecting the image the most important thing you can do is to resize your avatar. 50 pixels is not that big, in fact your face will not be recognizable unless you are the main part of that image. So remember that really cool picture of you hanging out the window of the UP Northern 833 (I remember that pick) You will have to zoom in on your face and crop out the engine to make it work (Trust me I tried to make it work)
Often people put full size images in as their avatar. The forum software will resize the avatar to fit, however that is only after the full size image loads. So what happens is somebody opens a thread, the entire 120kb file load and momentarily fills the screen until it is fully loaded and can be resized. Now if several people in one thread all have the wrong size avatars then suddenly everyone is waiting for several hundred kilobytes (kb) of avatar photos to download. A properly sized avatar will only be a few kb in size and the poor guy on dial up will not be waiting for your picture to load.
The best way to crop and resize your image is to use photo editing software on your computer. However if you do not have any or are unsure how to use it Photobucket allows you to crop and size an image to 50x50 (use custom size on the resize menu). Once you resize it you can download it to your computer and use it on the OGR Forum. Flickr also has a small image size, but it is 75x75 pixels. A bit large for the forum, but better than nothing.
Posting Your Avatar
Starting in your favorite section of the OGR forum look at the toolbar near the top of the posting section (Below the sponsor banners).
Click on the "Go" button (blue globe) then go to Personal Zone>Profile.
Click on View/Edit Complete Profile.
Scroll down until you see Avatar/Picture URL, click on Edit.
Select Upload Custom Avatar: Dimension 50x50 pixels.
Click the Browse button and navigate out to where you saved your avatar picture on your hard drive. Select your avatar picture and click on chose, then click on Update Avatar.
Click on Update Avatar
Scroll to the bottom of the page and click on Save Changes. You may be prompted to type in your password, enter it if asked
I have noticed there is sometimes a delay between posting your avatar and it first appearing on the forum, just be patient, if you did it correctly it will show up.