Hello,
I just registered, as we’re using Discourse here too and wanted to ask for this feature:
Is there a way to hide your login status? So that others can’t see, that you’re online?
Some users requested this to safely use Discourse during work. They don’t want, that others can publicly see, that they were logged in during their working hours. Most other board softwares that I know, have this feature.
Thanks for reading
Matthias
Hi MPW, welcome to the forum
Interesting you should ask. Others have been requesting that Discourse have a way to show online status.
Currently the closest thing to online status is “last post” and “last seen”
For example, if I click on the avatar or your name in your post I see
“Last post 7 mins ago”
Are you still online? Most likely, but maybe not.
If I go to your Profile
I also see
“Seen 7 mins”
Other than that, there is no way to know for certain whether or not any given member is online
Also, this is something that can easily be hidden using a CSS customization 
I think you misunderstood me a little:
That’s exactly the problem. If your boss knows your nick, he can check weather you’d been in the forum, while you were at work. Is there a way to disable this?
He or she knows that you’ve been at your office desk 7 mins ago 
.
Greetings
Matthias
Ok, then go to Admin, Customize, CSS and hide that via a CSS rule. Done and done.
Hi Matthias,
I struggled with the same problem - our user base settled with the following: I wrote a plugin that hides the online status on public pages. It removes that info rather than hiding it via CSS, but that solution is global, and no per-user setting. With that plugin, when you have an account and log in, you can get the information anyway. See this topic:
…if one day we get this one (this is what @Mittineague was referring to):
https://meta.discourse.org/t/presence-features-for-forums/12
…then I guess the urge to hide your presence will get more prominent, too…
I was thinking, even if member information was removed, there would still be post information visible .
i.e. “10h”, “21m” etc.
So with a little bit of mental math one could arrive at “Hey! that post was made during work hours!”
I’m not sure if the Admin Settings could be tweaked to show only “today” “yesterday” (I recently upgraded from Win 7 to Win 10 and Vagrant broke 
)
I’m also not sure if having less granular post times is such a good idea, but it is something to consider.
I’m also thinking this might be an “The Emperor’s New Clothes” idea that would give users a false sense of protection against being found out.
At least I know that at my previous employment all computer use that accessed external sites not part of the intranet were logged and analyzed.
I’m reminded of the sites where you can graph Tweets by the time of day they were made.
If someone is doing something during their work that their boss has disallowed then it seems like even if you think it should be allowed you should just not do it.
I might not be understanding this correctly though.
I don’t think that is true.
While other forum software has a feature to hide your online status for the Private Message function, I don’t think any of them have a way to hide when a post was made.
It’s a requirement of forum post that they have a date attached to them so they be kept track of.
Ofc, but Discourse always shows, when you’ve been online for the last time. That you shouldn’t do posts during work is obvious.
Okay, this is a way for the admins. I’m looking for a way to give the choice to the users.
How exactly can this be done just for the last_seen cell? Without turning off the whole div with “secondary” style?
For user card:
#user-card .card-content .metadata h3:first-of-type { display: none; }
For Profile page (pointless though as the Activity tab will still show your recent activity)
.user-main .about .secondary dl dt:nth-of-type(2), .user-main .about .secondary dl dd:nth-of-type(2), .user-main .about .secondary dl dt:nth-of-type(3), .user-main .about .secondary dl dd:nth-of-type(3) { display: none; }
Thank you, that’s very helpful!
How would you hide the “read” cell as well?
User Card:
#user-card .metadata h3:nth-child(3) { display: none; }
Thank you!
For the user profile page, I don’t think the code you posted from a year ago still works, that does not (for me) remove the “seen” field.
Do you know how to remove both the “last post” and “seen” fields from the profile page?
Profile Page, hide Last Post and Seen.
.user-main .about .secondary dl div:nth-of-type(2), .user-main .about .secondary dl div:nth-of-type(3) { display: none }
thank you so much! 
Sorry to ask another question: how would one hide the entire Stats section of the user profile page? (in particular, to hide the “recent read time” and “total read time”).