User Profile

Edit Profile

Use the profile dialog to view and edit information about yourself. The profile corresponds to the registration page – everything you entered during the registration process will appear in this dialog.

To edit your profile, open the profile menu and click on Edit profile menu item.

The only mandatory field is your email address. You can’t save profile changes if the email address is not correct, or if another user profile already uses this same email address.

Profile Photo

To add or change your profile photo, click on Photo tab, and then choose and upload an image from your computer. Good user photo has mostly the face visible, with not much background behind. For best results, make sure your image is at least 250 pixels wide and 250 high.

The image size in kilobytes is not critical, as long as it is under 10 MB, since the server will automatically resize it to 250x250 pixels.

To upload your photo, choose the Upload button under the current image, or drag an image from your computer over the existing one (note drag-and-drop only works in modern browsers, not in Internet Explorer 6, 7, or 8). After a short upload, the page will show the preview of the uploaded image. If you are satisfied, click Submit to close the dialog, Cancel to keep the existing image, or upload another image.

If you did not upload a profile photo, a random image will be assigned to your profile, from a set of 20 neutral default images.

Default Email Preferences

One can choose the frequency with which to receive email notifications from communities, and format in which to receive those notifications.

Default preferences apply to all communities one joins after creating the user profile, since new community preferences are set by default to respect user’s default preferences. Thus, if one has never changed community email preferences explicitly, default preferences apply to all communities.

To change your default email preferences, choose Preferences from the profile menu.

Default email preferences instructs ECS how often to send email notifications to the user:

  • immediate sends one email notification for each event that occurred (new discussion posted, new announcement, new link, etc.);
  • daily sends one cumulative notification email per day, listing all events that occurred;
  • weekly sends weekly digest, listing all events for the past week in a single notification email;
  • monthly lists all events for the past month in a single notification email message;
  • none prevents sending any email notifications.

TIP: When you go on holiday, set your default notification setting none to stop your email notifications from filling your mailbox. Of course, this only applies if all your communities use default notification settings.

Always send text-only email messages instructs ECS to send all email notifications in text-only format. If this box is not checked, then messages will be sent in HTML, unless the incoming message is text-only.

HTML messages always include a text-only variant, this is the way email is always sent on the Internet. When someone else contributes a discussion message in HTML, and the user decided to receive text-only messages, the system will strip the HTML part and send only a text portion to the subscriber. If, on the other hand, an incoming email message contains only text-only part, ECS will not try to add HTML formatting, and will forward the message as text-only.

Community Email Preferences

By default, communities use the same settings as defined in user’s default email preferences. Sometimes, however, it is desirable to set email notification preferences for a single community to something other than the default.

To change email notification preferences for current community, click on the profile menu and open Preferences dialog, and then click on Edit preferences for this community only link on the bottom of the dialog.

User Interface Language

You can explicitly set the language of the web user interface in the Preferences dialog.

Your language selection will apply to the language the web site is shown to you, as well as the footers of all email messages you receive.

Automatic option tells ECS to honor the langauge settings of your web browser. Every web browser sends to web sites the preference for language, by default set to the same language as the operating system of a computer one is browsing the Internet on. If browser requested language corresponds to any of the languages ECS supports, your user interface will be shown in that language. Otherwise, ECS will default to English. Email footers will be in a default community language that its leaders choose (or in English, if none is chosen).

Change Password

It is a good practice to change the password every few months. While ECS does not hold big secrets, if you are leading a large community, it might be inconvenient if someone guessed your password and started sending spam to all community members. It’s a good hygiene to use relatively random passwords and always combine letters, numbers and punctuation characters.

To change the password, click on the profile menu and open Change password dialog to type your new password twice.

Terminate Account

When you terminate your account, ECS will delete all your profile details and remove you from all communities you were a member of.

This is a destructive operation – and ECS will ask you to confirm your decision. Once you confirm account termination, your profile will be deleted and you will not be able to undo the process. The only way to get back into ECS will be to register again as a new user and request membership in all communities again.

Every time a user terminates account on ECS, all ECS coordinators will receive email – use the Reason box to communicate back your reasons for leaving or to share your experience (both positive or negative), and suggest how to improve the platform.

Remember Me and Logout

If you ticked Remember me checkbox during login to the web site, ECS will write a login cookie in your web browser. Later, when you visit ECS web site, again your web browser will send this cookie, and ECS will log you in without asking for your usename and password again.

When you choose Logout from the profile menu, ECS will erase the auto-login cookie and you will be required to enter your username and password the next time you visit ECS.

Thus, to continue benefiting form Remember me cookie, do not finish your sessions by clicking on Logout, rather, simply close the browser window (or a tab).

Of course, if you are accessing ECS from someone else’s computer, or from a web cafe, do not select Remember me in the first place, as that would allow anyone who uses the computer after you to access your ECS profile and communities.