UIC User's Guide: WebBoard Version 3.5

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5. Your Profile

For every user of the WebBoard system, a User Profile is maintained, which contains some information about the user. By default your profile will show your name, email address, location and statistics of your logins and postings. Whenever you see a person's name next to a message, clicking on it will display the user's profile.

You can edit your profile to provide more information to other users like home page URL, and your hobbies. The email address and home page URL are hyperlinks, i.e. clicking on an email address will open up an email message window or clicking on a URL will display the Web page. You could also include your picture or HTML-formatted text in the hobbies-field as well as in your signature. The signature you specify here will be attached to all your WebBoard postings.

An unedited profile will look like this:

To edit your profile, click on the MORE button and then on Edit your Profile in the right frame.

In the user profile screen, add the information you wish to add and then click the Save button at the end of the screen.

Note that you can change your password here. After changing it, you will have to re-authenticate to the system!

The user profile screen after it has been filled:

You should change the password the first time you log in to WebBoard. It is advisable to keep a unique password, easy to remember, preferably with reference to something. This way you will never forget it. Pick a password that has at least five characters and try to include numbers or symbols, too. Avoid using obvious choices like login ID, city name, etc.

Guidelines for Secure Password Selection

Note that you must enter your password twice for verification. You might want to use the same password you use for your icarus -account. If you change one, however, do not forget to change the other one too. The passwords on each system are independent of the other.

Note: while it is possible to change your login ID, you are not allowed to do so. Changing the login ID causes you to lose access to your previous messages. Your ID will eventually be changed back by your instructor anyway. You can correct errors in your name, but you should notify your instructor of such changes.

By default all the users have the frames option on. WebBoard can be viewed with or without frames.

To turn frames on or off at any time, choose Yes or No for Use Frames in the Profile window.

When the frames option is turned on, the screen is split into two frames side-by-side, namely the Conferences Menu and the Messages window.

When the frames option is turned off, the windows are displayed one at a time. Clicking on a conference will display its messages on a new screen and clicking on a message will display it in yet another new screen. To get back to the Conferences Menu, click on its link at the top of the screen.

Note: Older versions of browsers do not support frames. In this case, it is advisable to obtain a newer version of your browser.

The Full topic view option allows you to change the way the messages are displayed on the screen.

To turn it on or off at any time, choose Yes or No for Full topic view in the Profiles window.

When this option is on, related messages in a conference are displayed one after another in a threaded manner. This is the suggested way of viewing the topics.

When turned off, only one message is displayed at a time on the screen. To view the next message, you will have to click on the subject line of a message (when the frames option is on) or click on the Next link (when the frames option is off).

This option only matters if your board has any mailing lists, and if you are subscribed to some. It controls whether you receive email postings of each message posted in the respective conference, or just one email per day containing all of the day's postings, preceded by an index. If you select the Digest/ZIPped option, the actual postings will be contained in a ZIP archive attached to the message containing only the index. You will need a MIME-compliant email-program (such as Eudora, Outlook, pine) to handle this properly.

When finished, click on the Save button at the bottom of the page. If not using frames, go back to the Conferences Menu to see your changes take effect.

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