The Google Earth Community BBS is a powerful portal into the Google Earth world. Take a few moments to personalize it to your tastes so that it will serve you optimally. The control panel for this is behind the menu label "My Home" (in the BBS, not in the Google Earth client.) Click there and you will find that you can:

A. Edit personal information:
  • Change your email address
  • Set your password
  • Enter your full name
  • Define a signature to be attached at the bottom of every post
  • Add a link to your website if you have one
  • Describe yourself and your location
  • Present a short biography
  • Provide additional contact information
  • Set an image to be shown next to your name in posts, and,
  • Control what other people see about you and you see about them
It is all up to you. Tailor it to suit you perfectly!

B. Edit display preferences:
  • Select your language
  • Pick a new look for the entire BBS (bright, colorful, subdued, dark, etc.)
  • Define your offset from Universal Google Earth BBS time
  • Set your destination and configuration when first logging in
  • Set the number of shown threads
  • Specify a default sort order, and most importantly,
  • Set the size and configuration of listings and edit boxes.
This last is important. In fact, it motivated this whole tip! Be sure to configure to see ALL threads no matter how old, and my advice is to set your text area columns and rows much bigger (80x40) so that when you start to post, you'll not be forced to write through a tiny aperture. (Mine is configured to be even bigger, but that is because I am wordy when writing. )

C. Manage receiving forum posts by email and change message notifications. This area allows you to change notification so that you will get email when certain events happen at the BBS. This can be handy, for example, so that you can know when people reply on a favorite thread or send you a private message. You can also opt-in for rare (ever?) mailings to Google Earth Community members who have asked to be included in the mailing.

These are all interesting, but among them the most important to me was providing a link to a web site of my choice, uploading an icon, choosing the display "skin", setting the way-back machine to show all posts from the beginning of the Google Earth Community, enlarging the number of threads that are shown by default, and setting a huge edit box size for use in writing posts.

P.S. Did I mention that you should configure your login to show all the posts and not just the most recent few? Once you've done that, it will be time to tune-up your Google Earth Client for maximum performance!