After much investigation and internal debate, we’ve tentatively decided to disable the Hide Profile/Presence toggle in the Preferences section that enables users to customize their SDMB experience. However, we’ll leave the Presence feature enabled. Below is an explanation of what that means. We’re going to leave this thread open for comments before we do this in case there’s some downside we’ve overlooked:
- Your Profile is what pops up when somebody clicks on your user name in a post. It contains three things:
- optional personal information you posted yourself and can change or delete at will.
- system-generated logs of your SDMB activity, including most recent interaction (“seen”), most recent post, and lists such as stats, top replies, top topics, etc.
- various functions, including Message this user, Show posts by this user in this thread, Ignore/mute this user, and so on.
Your Profile consists of two pages. When you click on someone’s username in a thread, you first see a summary page like this:
Clicking on the summary page brings up a detail page like this:
- The Presence function displays your avatar to others when you’re responding to or editing a post. Below is what that looks like. These indicators display at the bottom of a topic and in the upper right of the post composer:
- Currently, if you click on the Hide Profile/Presence button in Preferences (Your avatar icon at upper right > Profile icon > Preferences > Interface > Other > Hide my public profile and presence features), no one else will be able to see your Profile AND your avatar won’t be shown when you’re replying to a post. If somebody clicks on your username in a post, here’s all they’ll see:
In our experience, enabling users to hide their Profile page offers little benefit and has many drawbacks:
a. It disables useful features or makes them more complicated. Examples:
-
It hides the “[Show] X posts [by this user] in [this] topic” button. This displays everything the user has posted in the thread on one page, making it easier to respond to a complex argument made over multiple posts. Absent this feature, you have to laboriously scroll through the thread or use the Search function.
-
It hides the “Message [this user]” button. You can still message the user, it just takes more steps.
-
It makes putting the user on Ignore much tougher - eight steps vs. three.
-
It hides basic facts such as Join Date and Number of Posts, which were routinely shown by the old vBulletin software.
b. It does little to protect privacy. Most of what’s in your Profile is a summary of your public activity on this board. It’s largely available through Search; the Profile page just puts everything in one place. The only semi-private information in your Profile is the optional information you post yourself. If you don’t want people to see this information, you can easily delete it.
c. It reduces transparency and provides a shield for trolls. A hallmark of the SDMB is that you’re responsible for what you post. Your Profile page makes it easier for others to get a handle on you, and we think that’s a good thing. Conversely, troublemakers tend to hide their Profiles so they can more easily hide their tracks. We think that’s a bad thing.
The Presence function is a different story. All it does is let people know you’re responding to a post. We can see some value in that, and no obvious downside. So we plan to leave the Presence function enabled.
To be clear, the SDMB does NOT have a “currently online” function as such. The “seen” function in your Profile shows the last time you interacted with the board. If it was five seconds ago, others can deduce you’re probably still online. vBulletin had a similar function - an icon in your posts changed color for a short time after your last post. If you’re concerned a stalker might see you’re online and send you nasty messages, you can easily block them using the Ignore function. Then report them to us. If someone is harassing people, we’ll ban them.
In sum, we see many benefits and few drawbacks to disabling Hide Profile, and we’ll do so soon unless we hear a good reason why we shouldn’t. If you think we’re overlooking something, please speak up.
