Shortly after joining, you will be allowed to upload an Avatar.

To help moderators, please make an effort to verify that the picture you want to use is not already taken. Moderators will not approve avatars already in use by others.

The requirements are:

• You must have visited the site for a week or more.
  
  
• You must have posted five times or more to the forums in answer to someone's question.
  
  
• You must have logged in using your random allocated (emailed) password at least once (i.e, your account is not marked as temporary). This is necessary to validate your email address. If you cannot remember receiving a temporary password, please use forgot password to get all the info back to your mailbox.

When you're ready, go to this page to get started.

Please make or find an avatar that is square. Any size is fine, but it will be resized to a width of 40 pixels when it is uploaded.

You are responsible for any copyright issues that may arise over use of your avatar. If an earlier member claims your avatar is too similar to theirs, that member will have priority. Moderator decisions in these matters are final.

This is the most frequently asked question. On the Windows platform, the Java support seems to frequently become unstable. The result is that an applet that loaded OK before no longer loads.

If rebooting and/or clearing your browser cache does not solve the problem then read on:

The easiest thing to do is to update the Microsoft Java virtual machine and replace it with the official Sun Java one. This can be done by visiting http://www.java.com/. Don't worry, the update is easy. Click on "free download" in the upper right corner, then follow the instructions on the next page.

For Macintosh, with Mac OS X, both Internet Explorer and Mozilla with the current Java version apparently work OK.

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If you're having difficulty with the site's tests and suspect a Java problem, please see this:
/faq/10976