Your User Control Panel ("User CP") is where you will do the majority of your personalization. Under your User CP, you'll see a list of links to the left which are used to navigate to different areas of your profile.

Signature: your signature is attached under every post you make on our forums. You may customize it any way you'd like and as often as you'd like, as long as it follows our signature guidelines.

UserPage: your UserPage is an extension of your profile which offers much more flexibility and room for personalization. You may use your userpage for anything you'd like as long as it does not violate our Terms of Service. If you're not sure how you would like to personalize yours, you can view other members' UserPages to get some ideas. When you're ready to customize your own, you can find the link in your User CP.

Avatar: your user avatar is the little picture that shows up under your user name, next to each post you make. You may use your own avatar or choose one from our avatar gallery, which includes almost 2,000 unique avatars.

Profile Options: there are several customizable fields under your profile options. You can edit the various profile fields such as your biography and location, reset your password, update your email, add a homepage URL and enter your username handles for any instant messengers you have.

Forum Settings: under your options menu, you can set all of your forum preferences for things such as email alerts, private messaging, and thread/forum display.

Profile Picture: your profile picture is a personal picture which will display when other members view your profile. You may update this picture at any time.

Favorite Smilies: you can change which smilies display in the smilies box when posting a new thread or reply by editing your favorite smilies. You can update your favorite smilies settings by going to the link within your control panel or by clicking on this button directly above the default smilie box.

Search:
MilitarySOS has a very powerful search feature which you can use to search all the forums at once, one specific forum or even within one specific thread. To search a specific forum or thread, you will see an option at the top of the forum/thread with a drop down search box. To do a search of the entire message board (more than one forum at a time), you can use the advanced search.

Adding Pictures:
To add pictures to your posts and/or signature, you will need to first upload the picture to a free photo hosting website, such as www.photobucket.com or www.imageshack.us or www.shutterfly.com
Once you have uploaded your pictures there, click on this button then paste the URL of your picture (you can find the URL by right clicking on your picture and coping the properties URL). The URL needs to be inserted between the [IMG] and [/IMG] tags. If you use photobucket or imageshack, they both offer a line of code to copy that's already been placed between the IMG tags for you. In that case, you will not need to use the button because it's already been done for you.