what is it you want to do with this data? i’m under the impression you want store it for some other functionality rather than just display it somewhere on the forum.
Well, my ultimate hope/vision was:
1. Tiered moderation
Grant owners of each unit in the community moderator powers over ONLY the residents of their unit.
Bearing in mind that there are close to 200 units in our community, it didn’t seem feasible to use the groups feature to accomplish this. See also #3 below, which groups would also conflict with.
2. Signup UX
The perfect UX in my mind would also make the drop menu for “unit” on the signup form dynamically react to the user’s choice in the “building” field, so as to offer only units that are in that building. (I was going to figure out some way to parse a JSON config file for this when Discourse initialized.)
3. Field privacy settings
I wanted to offer each user the choice whether to hide their building and/or unit number from other users not in their unit.
My impression is that the core custom fields feature offers this option only per field (not per user) and also only to admins, not to the users themselves.
4. Fancy styling
This would be more of an icing-on-the-cake thing, but instead of displaying it as something like “Owner: yes,” I wanted to give the system special knowledge of these fields to style them differently on user summaries. Like put an SVG deed icon, and a check mark if a moderator has confirmed their status (or a house icon for residents). That sort of thing.
So, yeah …
Maybe I’m being too picky here, but I feel like once I’m past the learning curve to accomplish the core functionality then the smaller wish list items will become almost trivial.
Many of the residents in my community are older people with little to no computer knowledge. I have serious concerns about some of the residents not wanting to adopt and use my Discourse website just because it’s new and not Facebook, let alone because of genuine usage issues like address privacy or unvalidated input of building/unit numbers.