Help:User preferences

See Help:Contents for all help pages

The preferences dialog allows you to personalize some aspects of a your Scholarpedia preferences. They will apply only when you are logged in. Most of the preference menus are self-explanatory.

User data

• Your e-mail: You may optionally register your e-mail address (it will not be shown publicly on the site or shared with any third party). This will enable you to reset your password by clicking the "Mail me a new password" box on the log in screen, if you forget it. Additionally, it will enable other registered users to send e-mail to you from the "E-mail this user" link on your user page unless you've checked the disable box (see below). If you are a curator, you must provide a legitimate email address.
• Name, Affiliation: Please provide your real name (first name, then last name) and your current affiliation. This line will be put at the top of every page that you curate.
• Enable e-mail from other users: If you check this, users will be able to send you e-mail by way of the "E-mail this user" feature.

Password

To change your password, enter your old password, the new password, and the new password a second time. (If you're merely changing the other preferences, you do not need to enter your password.)

• Remember password across sessions. Enabling this feature will place an HTTP cookie in your browser's cache, which will allow Scholarpedia to recognize you each time you visit the page. You will not have to log in each time you visit.

If you want to use remember my password you have to change your password if it was generated by Scholarpedia and emailed to you. This is a security feature but very often causes trouble for new users.

Time zone

• Time diff. This is the number of hours to be added or subtracted from UTC to find your time zone. This time zone is used when calculating displayed page update timestamps. Don't forget to update it to match your local time, because the Wiki doesn't know where you are or precisely when you celebrate DST. (Also, the server's clock may be slightly offset from reality, much as Wikipedia articles may be.) Look at this link or add and subtract a few hours as needed.

Keep this in mind when copying an excerpt from Recent Changes, a revision history listing, etc. to a Talk page. Convert manually to UTC or temporarily set the preferences to a zero offset before producing the revision history etc. to be copied.

Editing

• Rows, Columns. Here you can set up your preferred dimensions for the textbox used for editing page text.
• Edit box has full width. If this box is checked, the edit box (when you click "Edit this page") will be the width of the browser window, minus the quickbar width.
• Show edit toolbar. In compatible browsers, a toolbar with editing buttons can be displayed.
• Show preview on first edit - when pressing the edit button or otherwise following a link to an edit page, show not only the edit box but also the rendered page, just like after pressing "Show preview". This is especially useful when viewing a template, because even just viewing, not editing, typically requires both.
• Show preview before edit box and not after it. If you select this option, the preview will be displayed above the edit box when you click the "Show preview" button while editing a page.
• Add pages you edit to your watchlist. If this option is selected, any pages that you create or modify will be automatically added to your watchlist.
• Mark all edits minor by default. This option automatically selects the "This is a minor edit" checkbox when you edit pages.
• Use external editor by default. Changes editing from online version to external program. See External editors.
• Use external diff by default. Changes diffing from online version to external program. See External editors.

Recent changes and stub display

• Hide minor edits in recent changes. Registered users may choose to mark edits as being minor (meaning fixes too trivial for trusting users to check up on).
• Enhanced recent changes (not for all browsers). Group recent changes per day by article, display the titles of the changed articles in order from new to old latest change, or in the case of hiding minor edits, latest major change. This feature applies also to Related Changes, but not to the watch list.

Search

• Hits to show per page: You may choose the number of results returned on each page of search results.