"This user's public profile is hidden"

I clicked on someone’s profile (I enjoy reading that member’s posts, so I check their posting history occasionally ) and right now the only thing visible is “This user’s public profile is hidden.” No post activity can be seen, no private messages can be sent, nothing. Then I went looking through my own profile to see how to do this (which I don’t want to do, I’m just curious) and can’t find a setting to hide myself.

Anyway, what’s up with a profile that shows as “This user’s public profile is hidden” ?

From Preferences choose Interface and scroll down to check off the hide profile box.

Many users have hidden profiles, even those who didn’t deliberately hide their profile on Discourse. My guess is that we had a hidden profile setting on VBulletin that worked differently but carried over when our profiles were migrated.

Are you sure? You can’t send a message from the poster’s profile, but if you click on your own profile in the top right corner, and choose the “Mail” menu, you can send a message by filling in the poster’s name. (At least, it looks that way to me. I checked by using the name of a poster with a hidden profile, and it auto-filled in. I didn’t want to bother that poster, so I didn’t click “send”, but it sure looks like you can send a message that way.)

Huh, good to know, thanks