Your username is whatever you chose during the signup process and is included in the receipt you received from PayPal. If you can't remember it, please drop us a note at the contact form.

You cannot change your username. Usernames are your identity in the community and carry a lot of weight with others that read your comments. If you are changing your username you are effectively disappearing from the site and reappearing anew. Unless there is a grave and life-threatening reason to change your username, you cannot get it changed. If you are really unhappy with your username, you can sign up for an all new account.
(tags: username user preferences ) March 6, 2006 - permalink - back to questions

Here's the thread where it was discussed in MetaTalk. This feature gives you an easy way to share links on two major sites. The Twitter link will give you a short URL to use for a thread as well. If you don't like this feature, you can turn it off in your preferences.
(tags: twitter facebook share preferences social ) January 14, 2011 - permalink - back to questions

Your Site Preferences let you choose a colored (default theme) or white (plain theme) background, and customize the size and font of different text types. You can use any font that's installed in your computer, just enter the name. (If a font name isn't working, try copying the exact name of the font as it appears in your computer's Fonts folder or library.) You can set the fonts to be bigger or smaller, and you can set any font size to 0 (zero) to remove that text from the display.

The defaults are these, in case you want to return to them after changing: Body Font - Verdana; Body Font Size - 10; Byline Font - Verdana; Byline Font Size - 8; Title Font - Arial; Title Font Size - 14.

When you click Save on your Site Preferences page, the display settings you chose are saved as cookies to your browser. That means you can have different display settings for different browsers. For example, you might use the default theme on your home computer, but the plain theme on your phone. Keep in mind that adjusting your display settings will change them for the browser you are currently using, but not other browsers. So if you want to update a particular display setting across all of the browsers you use, you'll need to re-save your display preferences on each of them. Be aware that saving your display preferences will make those settings the default choices next time you load the preferences page.

For information about switching between the mobile view and standard view of the site, see here.
(tags: display preferences fonts titles text defaults color theme cookies ) January 10, 2012 - permalink - back to questions

MeFi Mail reminders are system messages sent from MetaFilter to your MeFi Mail inbox. The most common messages are reminders to update Ask MetaFilter threads 30 days after posting. You'll also receive messages about new posts you make to any MetaFilter site. Those message include the post URL which can help you find the post again in the future. If you opt-out of MeFi Mail reminders you won't receive these messages.
(tags: mefimail preferences ) March 30, 2012 - permalink - back to questions

Yes. You can change how favorites are displayed to you, throughout the site, by changing a setting in your Preferences.

The options are:
- Default - shows a number indicating how many favorites a comment has
- "Has Favorites" - only indicates if a comment has favorites or not, does not show a number. If you want to see the number for a given comment, you can reveal it by mousing-over the phrase "has favorites".
- "Hide Favorites" - does not display favorites to you at all (however, you can still use the Favorite feature)
(tags: favorites preferences ) December 11, 2012 - permalink - back to questions