How do I add avatars?

There are three ways to add avatars.

1. Use your account on OnChat™
2. Adding a URL that contains avatar images
3. Manually adding an index.txt file (Not recommended)

1. Adding avatars using OnChat™'s booster membership
Open a premium account at OnChat™ to store your avatars.

Use the wizard in TrueChat's Avatar Browser Window to add the avatars from OnChat™.


OR


2. Adding a URL that contains avatar images
If you have web pages or URL's with your avatars on them, you can add them into TrueChat very easily.

There are several free websites where you can upload your avatars, including http://geocities.yahoo.com. Some sites like flickr.com will convert your gif's to jpg's and image transparency will be lost. Please comment on this post if you locate a place where gif's can be uploaded for free.

Make a note of the url of the web page, for example: http://geocities.yahoo.com/me/male_avatars.html
You should be able to see this URL with avatars on it, in your favourite web browser (IE, firefox, mozilla etc). If you don't then check the URL.



Open the Avatar Browser, and click on the Add button. A window will open asking you to enter a URL of an avatar webpage.



Give the list a name and enter the url of the web page. In this case, we're using the URL copied from the browser shown above.



Click on the Add button, and the window will tell you the number of avatars found, while TrueChat loads up your avatars.



TrueChat is finished loading up your avatars when you see the Done window.



Note: The avatar images have to be at most 150X150 (width X height) and less than 10Kb in size. The images must be in gif, jpg or png format and can have transparency. Animated gifs are also ok, though images that are optimized too much may not display correctly (turn off optimization when you are making animated gifs in photoshop etc).


OR


3. Manually adding an index.txt file (Not recommended)
First upload your avatars to a web server. There are several free ones, including http://geocities.yahoo.com.

The avatar images have to be at most 120X120 (width X height) and less than 5Kb in size. The images must be in gif or jpeg format and can have transparency.

Create a file called index.txt in the same directory as the avatar images. The index.txt file should contain a list of all the avatar images in the directory with one avatar image listed per line.

Make a note of the url of the index.txt file, for example, http://geocities.yahoo.com/me/index.txt

Click on the "Add" Button of the Avatar Browser Window. Give the list a name and enter the url of the index file . That's it !
Example of contents of index.txt :

foo.gif
myavatar.gif
another_avatar.gif
....

Make sure that the images listed are in the same directory as the index.txt file.