User Profile

View Profile

Use the profile page to view and edit information about yourself, and to view and set your email preferences. The profile corresponds to the registration page – everything you entered during the registration process will appear on this page.

To view your own profile, click on my account button in the top right corner of the screen.

Edit Profile

To the profile, click on the edit link in the green bar above the picture. You will not be able to save changed profile data if all mandatory fields are not filled in properly.

You might find that one or more of the mandatory fields are empty when you first opened the profile editor – this is most likely because your profile was imported in batch, and not all data was available. The batch import process is the only way that can avoid creating a profile without filling in all mandatory fields.

Public Profile

The public profile is used to show a limited set of information about a user to other community members, users, or the general public if a community is visible publicly. The public profile is a subset of user’s profile.

To edit the public profile, click on edit public profile and check the check boxes next to the fields you want to be included in the public profile. The first and last name are mandatory, and cannot be de-selected. To include the photo in the public profile, select the check box below the photo.

Default Email Preferences

Part of the profile is a general preference for receiving email. 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 default preferences, edit the profile and select new options for Default email preferences, Email format, and Receive notifications of own contributions.

Default email preferences instructs PCO 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.

Email format instructs PCO to send either text-only messages or to format them in HTML. (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.

Receive notifications of own contributions specifies whether a user wants to receive a copy of own contributions when those are distributed to all members. The default setting is on, and is a good way to know that the contribution was properly received by PCO and properly distributed to other members.

Change Community Email Preferences

Email preferences for each community one is a member of are listed below user profile data, in community info section. 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 a single community, click on I would like to change this below the community title and adjust preferences as needed.

If you would like to set different preferences for all communities at once, click on I would like to edit notification preferences for all communities at once. While editing preferences for all communities, click on Reset to defaults to set all community preferences to default again.

Change Password

It is a good practice to change the password every few months. While PCO 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 change password and type your new password twice.

Add or Edit a Photo

To add your photograph, click on change photo, and then choose and upload a photograph from your computer. Good user photo has mostly the face visible, with not much background behind. While the image looks large in the current profile page, keep in mind that in the future the application might use much smaller versions of it to show next to your name on different pages, and thus any background detail might become illegible.

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

Terminate Account

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

This is a destructive operation – and PCO 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 PCO will be to register again as a new user and request membership in all communities again.

Every time a user terminates account on PCO, all PCO 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.