My feeling is that lurkers are way more likely to cause problems than members. Most membership sites limit the options of “guests” for that reason. If they want full privileges, they should join. It seems hypocritical to want full privileges without participating fully. You might say that it’s, “wanting your cake while eating it too”.
I would like to present a case to both the Staff and Members of why we should turn off this feature. Location of said flag: Preferences - Interface - Hide my public profile and presence features
The Positives:
- It hides the fact your currently present on the board.
The Negatives:
- In threads, it prevents non-staff from using the filter to see all posts by a user in the thread. Currently you click user name or avatar and click # posts in topic
- Prevents seeing Profile date by clicking on the username or avatar.
This shows join date and number of posts. All of which was traditionally available on the SDMB going back to 1999. - it gets used a lot by our Trocks. So much so it has become a bit of a red flag when a new user uses this.
Pros and cons:
- Makes it harder to ignore posters. To me this is also a con, but Discourse staff will explain ignoring people cuts down on discourse.
Does it hide your Email address? No as Emails are never shown to the public and the setting in question doesn’t matter.
From BigT’s link:
Am I missing any other key points?
Calling for input from everyone that posted more than once in this thread on topic.
@Max_S @puzzlegal @Johnny_Bravo @GreysonCarlisle @BigT @LSLGuy @chela @needscoffee @Exapno_Mapcase @SCAdian @Atamasama @ASL_v2.0
I can’t see anyone’s email addresses in their profiles ever.
I also would note it makes it harder to ignore (temporarily or permanently) users that one needs a break from (in the interest of board harmony, of course). Not impossible, just harder.
Thank you for verifying that, I adjusted my post to reflect your data.
@codinghorror’s post linked above suggests that it may be possible to disable the ability to hide your profile, but still allow you to hide your “presence.” If so, that might be worth looking into.
I can say that if it were 2 different options: hide my profile and hide my presence I would use the presence one. I don’t like the idea of constantly informing wheter I’m on a site or not, but I don’t want to fully hide my profile.
I believe the presence feature should be disabled entirely. There’s no reason anybody needs to know whether another user happens to be currently browsing the board.
Though if it’s possible to make presence a toggle for users, that’s good too.
This is my opinion, as well. It’s just basic web privacy.
This is a massive problem, and the fact that staff don’t have to deal with it maybe explains why there’s been no urgency in addressing it.
Discourse’s main flaw imo is that it’s shit at allowing users to easily navigate large threads. It will only load a small slice of posts at a time, necessitating constant loading and reloading to jump around. In vbulletin et al, you can view hundreds of posts at a time in plain html.
Filtering by user isnt a useful tool: it’s a mandatory one. Users with hidden profiles make the board more difficult to use and I quite genuinely have trouble seeing it as anything other than a thumb in our collective eyes when they chose to do so.
I’m not seeing much value to a user in hiding their profile. What, exactly, becomes private?
Is it really just join date, number of posts, and whether they are currently logged in? The currently logged in isn’t even accurate. I usually leave a sdmb window open on my computer, which is basically always online. Does it say that I’m always online? Or do i need to have been active in the window in the last X minutes to activate that?
I see no value to the community in people hiding their join date. And you can find number of posts to enough accuracy for any reasonable purpose just by doing a search, so that’s totally pointless.
If I was playing a game of Mafia here, I might hide my profile because it would make my posting history much more difficult to parse for other players. It would be an amazing tool for preventing other players from analyzing my thought processes and interactions across large, quick-moving threads.
That’s the value.
And it isn’t necessary to have any info in the profile other than one’s history on the board. So I don’t see any way that it protects off-board privacy to be able to hide it, as opposed to just not entering any information the user doesn’t want visible – including not entering anything at all, other than username and the invisible emails.
And it doesn’t effectively protect on-board privacy, even if we want to do that; which I think we probably don’t. But it is possible for anybody who’s logged in (and just about anybody can log in) to find a poster’s current and older posts, with a moderate degree of determination, even if the profile’s hidden.
The only reason I can see for even having the feature would be if the board required entering information into the profile such as IRL names, locations, etc. And this board doesn’t do that.
How is that a value for anyone who’s not a troll?
Which may be your point.
But if we’re going to understand each other, being able to follow each other’s thought processes through a thread is what’s useful.
You can’t go in and look at their profile at all. If they put any info in there like location or full name you can’t see it (but as I said before if you don’t want people knowing those things, don’t fill them in, they’re optional). You also can’t easily see their replies or topics, which a profile shows you, but you can still get that by searching for @ and their name (it’s just less convenient).
Yes, i don’t generally give my name or location on a chatsite at all if i don’t want to share it with everyone. You never know when some glitch might reveal it, for instance. And just… Why would you even enter that info if you didn’t intend to share it.
But i suppose some people might have done that. So that’s a warning that if we disable the ability to hide profiles, we need to give enough warning that anyone who might have done so has time to remove the information.
I’m going to request that people who have chosen to hide their profile say explicitly what they want to hide from whom. If you aren’t comfortable saying that in this public thread, please message me or any other mod with that information. We will only share it with other staff. But it will be very useful in our discussion of the topic.
(Also, if you entered stuff like you name just because you could, and you DON’T want to actually share it, this might be a good time to start removing it. As we are talking about it now.)
And if we learn that only trolls and clueless people have hidden their profiles, we may see if we can disable that.
I think there are probably three categories of people who use hidden profiles, with some likely overlap.
- Trolls and trocks
1a) Non-troll jerks who get a kick out of being passive aggressively annoying - Privacy buffs who don’t actually understand the lack of value in hiding their profile
- Privacy buffs who don’t want their online status displayed
Group one can pound sand. Group two can be forgiven for their ignorance, but also doesn’t need to be catered to.
Group three should be catered to: not with hidden profiles, but by turning off the useless presence feature.
We have a lot of members, and only a few trolls. A priori, my guess is most of the hidden profiles belong to people in group 2.
And i agree that we don’t need to offer them that meaningless choice.
I have no objection to the presence feature either being removed or becoming optional.
I have started a discussion in the Modloop, linking back to this thread.
We have a PM thread going also with this discussion as I mentioned earlier.
Maybe we can get something done about this and educate people on why the hidden profile is pretty much just a tool for trolls if we turn off the Presence feature.
IMO this summarizes the situation exactly.
Private profiles are 99.8% useless on SDMB. The feature provides the private profile user with no true benefit that can’t be gotten as easily by simply leaving their personal info fields blank, and it actively harms the readability of every thread they post to.