Please bring my pony back to life!

December 16, 2007 10:08 AM

Fields in user profiles used to have a different color background if they contained information only visible to logged in community members. Can we have this back please?

It was a good reminder of what information shouldn't necessarily be posted on public pages, and made it easier not to out people accidentally.

posted by grouse to feature requests at 10:08 AM (23 comments total)

I removed it for a couple reasons. One it was kind of ugly how various bits of a profile page had a darker background, and second, it was one of those non-intuitive things you had to read in a faq somewhere or in metatalk to realize what it even meant.

I looked at other services that have profiles of varying degrees of privacy and noticed none of them delineate what information other people are sharing with you. Different people see different stuff (general public, other members, your mutal contacts) on various parts of the site and like other sites, you just either get more or less functionality based on who you are.

We still have the options and the personal stuff is hidden by default (not to mention the entire user profile page is not indexed by google) and I realized once I removed the backgrounds, it made the page look a little nicer and didn't introduce confusion about what the colored backgrounds meant.

I don't see much of an "outing" problem with keeping things as is. If there's a question in ask mefi and you can tell the person's location from their profile, I don't think it's a privacy nightmare to simply say stuff like "I see you're in San Diego, well when I lived there, the laws were such that..." within a thread.

Are there examples I'm not thinking of? Or do you have experiences where you saw the blue background and treated the information differently?
posted by mathowie at 10:25 AM on December 16, 2007 [2 favorites]

Or do you have experiences where you saw the blue background and treated the information differently?

More than once I have refrained from posting identifiable information in response to an AskMe question because the background reminded me what was public and what wasn't. Maybe people don't think it is a big deal and that if this information goes on the profile, it might as be posted to threads. I was trying to be conservative about the personal info of other people I post, but maybe this is unnecessary?
posted by grouse at 10:30 AM on December 16, 2007

I don't have strong feelings about it, but it was a useful bit of differentiation and I didn't think it was "ugly" at all.
posted by languagehat at 10:32 AM on December 16, 2007

I was trying to be conservative about the personal info of other people I post, but maybe this is unnecessary?

Well, I'm inclined to keep things as-is, and if anyone ever does feel uncomfortable with any info that gets out, we can always step in and remove comments that might identify where they live.
posted by mathowie at 10:44 AM on December 16, 2007

Amazon has a neat profile feature where you can "View page as seen by you / friends / everyone." Of course, you can achieve roughly the same effect both places by logging out, but I found it pretty handy there.
posted by Wolfdog at 10:46 AM on December 16, 2007

Huh. I'm a dedicated plain theme user and don't remember ever noticing this. Was it differentiated in plain? Sounds useful, to be sure, because when I read an ambiguous AskMe I go straight to the asker's profile for additional info, but I'd still try to respect their privacy wishes if I could. Perhaps just an asterisk next to insider-only info, with an explanatory footnote?
posted by mumkin at 10:51 AM on December 16, 2007

As a general rule, it's probably best to be conservative about porting info from profile pages over to threads regardless of highlighting, is my thinking.
posted by cortex at 11:14 AM on December 16, 2007

The location field is hidden to non-members. So every time anyone has ever said "since I see from your profile that you're from X, the law is...", they were breaking the member/non-member barrier.
posted by smackfu at 11:21 AM on December 16, 2007

If it's so ugly, why not reorganize the profile page so it's all in one area? This way, you don't have random splotches of color everywhere. Form should always follow function, but that doesn't mean you have to abandon it altogether.
posted by Eideteker at 1:11 PM on December 16, 2007 [1 favorite]

We're through the looking glass here people! Locations are visible! We KNOW where you ARE!
posted by blue_beetle at 2:31 PM on December 16, 2007

For years I've wanted the profile page to be more user friendly, user-configurable, dummy-proof (cuz I'm a dummy) and a host of other things, but I can't for a nanosecond think I KNOW how to do any of this stuff, and I know the user pages are very low on priority for our stalwart band of heroes*. That shouldn't be why people come to MeFi, but there's a part of me that wonders why the hell not?

Some time back I tried my hand at improving my MeFi user page and making it informative and entertaining and trying to just make it 'me', but then I stole someone else's tagging in an attempt to make it more 'me' which made it less 'me' and now that's gone cuz it stopped working - well okay it never worked really but for awhile it amused me. Now my user page is a rowdy unruly mess that no one should want to read and I pretend is good when it's not.

I don't know what it would take to make an average user MeFi page something that people would like to go to more, or if that's something anyone would want. Personally I don't get why they aren't searchable via Google, but then I foolishly have personal information just out there on the Internet like I'm some kinda idiot. I'm sure it'll bite me in the butt sooner rather than later, but again I'm too much of an idiot to dread that day.

In hindsight, I don't recall the different colored fields being helpful to me. I recall them being ugly and unpleasant, but that's probably a subjective taste thing.

* y'know whut ah mean: matthowie, cortex, jessamyn, etc. I'm not up on the details who all I should be asking for autographs. I used to just call them The Powers That Be but that has questionable connotations these days. I can't think of a suitable phrase that refers to the people who make MeFi work which isn't either condescending or buttkissy. I don't wanna be either but I'll err on the buttkissy side just to be safe.
posted by ZachsMind at 2:52 PM on December 16, 2007

Amazon has a neat profile feature where you can "View page as seen by you / friends / everyone."

Contrary to what Matt has apparently observed, many sites do have this sort of functionality.
posted by stavrosthewonderchicken at 3:14 PM on December 16, 2007

If you don't want people to know your real name or where you live, you shouldn't put it on your profile page. The member/non-member barrier is about as strong as a five-dollar bill.
posted by The corpse in the library at 3:54 PM on December 16, 2007

If you don't want people to know your real name or where you live, you shouldn't put it on your profile page.

Well, there's also the question of information slipping into threads being both Googleable and not changeable by the user. But of course the admins can push that info down the memory hole, if need be.

I had assumed there were people who didn't want their community-visible info spread to the whole world, but the fact that no one has started screaming in this thread indicates that I have been too sensitive to the desires of phantoms.
posted by grouse at 3:59 PM on December 16, 2007

Even Fark has a "view your profile as seen by others" option^*, and Drew is a drunk^**.

^*this may be a total fabrication

^**this isn't, necessarily
posted by mr_crash_davis at 6:35 PM on December 16, 2007

the fact that no one has started screaming in this thread indicates
that it's been a slow afternoon around here.
posted by LobsterMitten at 7:41 PM on December 16, 2007

IS THIS THE SCREAMING THREAD?!?
posted by puke & cry at 7:54 PM on December 16, 2007 [1 favorite]

I actually thought it was pretty cool, and I always was sorry that other sites (Facebook, etc.) didn't take the cue and do it also. It's pretty handy to know what's "public" information about someone and what's being shared with you because of a relationship of some sort.
posted by Kadin2048 at 8:22 PM on December 16, 2007

the fact that no one has started screaming in this thread indicates
... that it's Sunday for USians.
posted by dg at 1:45 AM on December 17, 2007

Still no screaming, though. If the onslaught begins in a few hours then I will retract that.
posted by grouse at 1:50 AM on December 17, 2007

I approve of this feature. Similarly, I don't like how Facebook doesn't show me in context what is world/network/friend viewable. This will be important until the rise of transparent connected living destroys the concept of privacy.
posted by TheOnlyCoolTim at 8:53 AM on December 17, 2007

If you have nothing to hide, you've got nothing to fear. Except fear itself, and believe me, it's SCARY!
posted by blue_beetle at 8:58 AM on December 17, 2007

People say my responses to everything are fear-driven.

I'm afraid they're wrong about that.
posted by Devils Rancher at 10:00 AM on December 17, 2007