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V. Your WebBoard Profile

Each WebBoard user has a profile that can be edited to reflect personal style, interests, and hobbies. By default, your profile will show your name and email address, as well as other login information and statistics about your postings.

If you have a personal homepage, say on a UIS system like eagle.uis.edu, you can create a link to it from your profile. You can augment the default profiles with a text description of your interests and background, or using HTML, you can include a picture of yourself or stylized text. Here's what a plain profile looks like (without adding pictures or other text).

Profile

Whenever you see a person's name next to a WebBoard message, whether in a list of messages or in the message header, you can click on it to see that user's profile in the Message window. The Email Address and Home Page fields are hyperlinked, that is you can click on the email address or the URL and your browser will automatically open a mail message addressed to that user, or display the Web page, respectively.

Editing your Profile
Your personal User Profile can be edited. This is where you edit your WebBoard password (see the section "Changing your WebBoard Password", below). Also, you can fill in the Home page, Hobbies, and Signature fields to personalize your profile and your messages.

To edit your profile:

  1. Click on the More button at the top of the WebBoard window.
  2. Next, click on the My Profile link. The topmost portion of the User Profile is shown below. The WebBoard Administrator will have already filled in certain fields for you.

    Note: you cannot edit your login name.

    Edit Profile

  3. Fill in the fields that are empty, such as Home page.
  4. Fill in the Hobbies field with information about your course of study and interests. Text typed into the Hobbies will be displayed under your name in your profile. HTML entered into this field will be displayed correctly, so you can create a WebBoard "resume" about yourself that includes stylized text and graphics.
  5. Fill in the Signature field--it will be appended to the bottom of each of your posts. Like the Hobbies field, the signature can be plain text or HTML.
  6. Click on the Save button at the bottom of the screen.

Edit Profile

Use Frames: Changing How WebBoard is Displayed
WebBoard can be viewed with or without frames--by default all users have frames on. With the Use frames option on (click the Yes radio button), the WebBoard screen is divided into side-by-side windows, one with the Conferences menu (left) and the other showing the messages (right frame). When you click on the message subject line in the menu, the message is displayed in the right-side frame.

With frames turned off (click the No radio button), the Conferences menu appears separately from the messages window.When you click on the link for a particular message, the browser displays that message or message thread. To go back to the list of messages, click on the Conferences menu link at the top of the messages page.

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

Full Topic View: Viewing Threads
The Full topic view option in the Profile window allows you to control how you view related messages. Turned on (click the Yes radio button), this option makes WebBoard display related messages consecutively, in a threaded manner. For example, you would see the original topic message followed immediately by each reply to it (including replies to the replies). This is the most efficient way to view WebBoard conferences.

Turned off (click the No radio button), you will see only one message at time, and will have to click on the subject line of each message to view it.

Saving Changes to your Profile
When you've finished editing your profile, click on the Save button at the bottom of the page. WebBoard will inform you that the changes have been saved. If not using frames, a link will appear at the top of the Profile page that will take you back to the Conferences menu. Otherwise, just click the back button to return to the conferences.

Please send comments and suggestions to the UIS  webmaster.

Written content provided by Jolee West and the Sloan Center for Asynchronous Learning Environments .