Miscellaneous settings explained
The entire Preferences menu can seem daunting at first. Let us explain the remaining settings as profile and notification settings are explained elsewhere.
This guide is part of the Transition Tutorials.
Summary
In this tutorial, the following 5 settings pages are explained:
- Security
- Users
- Interface
- Navigation
- Saved Searches.
Find help on Email, Notifications and Tracking pages in Understand the new notifications system. The Account and Profile pages are explained in Setting up your user profile.
To find the Preferences pages, please hit your profile picture, then select Preferences.
Security settings
Open the security settings page.
This shows you a list of all the devices (computers, phones, and tablets) that are currently signed into Connect using your Google Account. You can remove unknown devices if you see one that is not yours.
In case you need to remove a device, please also visit Google Account’s security settings to change your password and find more ways to improve your digital safety.
Users settings
Here you can ignore and mute users you consider to be “irritating.” Then you won’t see their contributions, and/or you can block them from contacting you.
Under Ignored, you can add users if you prefer not to see their topics and replies. Furthermore, they will not be able to send you private messages. For each ignored user, you need to select a timeframe from one day to forever.
Users added to the Muted list cannot send you private messages, but their topics and replies will be visible to you.
So ignored is a more severe block than muted.
Under Messages on the users page, you can allow and disallow all users from sending you private messages. Or if you want to allow only a few friends to be able to message you, this can also be specified here.
Interface settings
Open the Interface settings page
At the top, you can decide the font size on Connect. From smallest to largest.
The Interface language decides the language used in Connect menus and what language you want the automatic translations to go to, as explained in the Translations tutorial.
Under other (still on the Interface Settings page), there are 9 different settings to explain.
Use the red numbers to find the relevant explanations below.
1:
Should links open in the same or a new tab? Links other Connect pages will not be opened in a new tab.
2:
Right before writing a reply, you can select some of the text to be cited in your reply.
Here the text ‘Let’s keep exploring’ is highlighted. Then hit the reply button.
See how the highlighted text is now included in the answer in the screenshot below. After publication, this will be a clickable link back to the quoted text.
3:
Messages can be marked unread even though you actually have read them. You can use this to mark and filter messages you need to take further action on. When selected, the dark gray Mark unread button shown below will be available to you.
4:
Google Moderators can pin a topic to always be shown as the first topic. This can be helpful for important announcements. But if you already read the topic, you can have the topic unpinned automatically if you check this box.
5:
If you don’t want others to see when you are online, and hide your Connect profile page, you can check this setting. The green Online now-dot will not appear between your profile picture and your name.
6:
You can decide if a number should be shown next to the browser tab name, as shown here:
I have this one turned on, so I can see how many new items there are in my bell feed without opening the Connect tab.
7:
Here you specify what number should be shown next to the browser tab name. The number of new topics or the number of new notifications in your bell feed. I use the latter.
8:
Here you can specify what happens when a bookmark reminder shows up. See the options in the screenshot below. Read about bookmarks here.
I prefer Delete bookmark, once I reply.
9:
When you first start using Connect, some friendly tips pop-up here and there. Here is an example:
This tip draws your attention to the notification bell.
You can decide to show or not show these tips.
We are almost done!
Navigation settings
Open the navigation menu page.
If you check Link to the filtered list, the topics with new replies will be shown at the top of your list of topics. After you have read one of them it is pushed down into normal chronologic order. This can be a bit confusing at first.
On your list of topics, you can have the number of new replies show in blue when there are new replies. If you uncheck Show a count of new items, you will instead see the light blue dot next to topics with new replies.
Saved Searches
To open your Saved Searches page:; 1) Hit your Profile picture , 2) Hit Preferences , then 3) Hit Saved Searches .
Connect can help you regularly search for words you are interested in. This can be relevant if your interests are more specific than the existing categories and tags. In the above screenshot, you can see that I will be notified about any new topics and replies using the project Local Guides Clean The Map’s hashtag. And every week I will be notified of new content mentioning the word vegetarian.
This is the end of this tutorial.
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Credit: The oil painting shown at the top is Beach at Trouville by Eugène Boudin. Painted in 1864/5. Courtesy National Gallery of Art, Washington.