IPB Tutorial: Emoticons and Smilies in IPB

Emoticons are symbols that use computer characters to convey emotion or tone in an electronic message. IPB gives you the option to pre-define them in the admin control panel:

Just select the ones you would like to be used in your forum and click on Update Emoticons.
Inserting emoticons can be done when replying to an existing topic or opening a new one. Once configured, the option will show the available faces (emoticons) in the user panel:

Avatars

An avatar is a graphical image of a user intended to make the network environment closer to reality. Avatars and photos' characteristics can be set from the IPB admin area -> Tools & Settings tab -> User profiles.

From there you can set permissions for image file extensions, Hot-linking (Allow users to use remote URL avatars), which is not a very good idea as some web sites have this disabled and hot-linking directly to them will result in an error. The rest of the options are self-explanatory :) 

You can check the phpBB tutorial and vBulletin tutorial for further reference.

Please, feel free to contact us if you have any questions or recommendations about this tutorial at: tutorials 'at' siteground.com