This topic has been closed a bit too early imho, so here is another one. Mods might merge the threads or something…
In our Discourse-based community the discussion about user privacy came up as well, because all the fine-grained details about a users’s behaviour on the site can be checked out in the site’s users overview. This is unexpected for users, who have ticked the proposed “Hide my public profile and presences features” setting. Check it out at this very site:
It should not be shown in the list either. Another option would be to have a separate checkbox in the settings to set e.g. “appearance in the user list”.
Your profile is hidden. Users can always see their own profile.
You are always at the top of /users when viewing, for purposes of comparison. Hide my public profile and presences features doesn’t hide them from yourself.
That topic was automatically closed 30 days after the last reply, that’s fairly normal.
The setting does exactly what it says to be honest:
It hides your profile from public view (admins, mods, and yourself can see it)
It stops the presence feature from showing when you’re typing in a topic
As far as stats go, someone could go count all the posts and likes you’ve made manually. I’m not certain what the privacy concern is here. If a user wants anonymity on a site for their actions, admins can turn on anonymous posting mode, which the user can enter so that activity isn’t associated.
I get what you’re saying. Fair enough for the posts and likes received. A little harder for the likes given, but still doable. “Topics viewed”, “Posts read” and “Days visited”: That can’t be known by anybody exterior to the site, and probably the privacy concern of the OP you’re searching for.
On the contrary, I find this unfortunate (having a private profile myself). I would be OK, and would love this to still work (we’re talking of “xxx is typing” you see when someone is writing a reply, correct ?)
hiding your profile doesn’t hide it from… yourself…
hiding your profile doesn’t make your stats disappear from the users directory at discourse.example.com/users
So only the latter is a valid concern, and if the site mods care enough about this they can disable the user directory altogether in the site settings.
I have re-titled and re-categorized the topic to reflect the actual discussion.
correct. sorry for not being specific enough. Maybe the wording of the setting “Hide my public profile and presences features” can be improved.
What if the admins do not care enough, but some users do? What is wrong with wanting to hide from the user list how much I hang out here? It’s not like this would be a very exotic feature, is it?
The user list could indeed show “hidden” or “private” for the “presence” stats columns of those who wanted to hide it in the first place (and maybe wrongfully thought they were).
Sure I think that is a reasonable feature request. If you’ve intentionally chosen to hide your your user profile via your user preferences, we could X out all the stats in the user directory. Not sure how much engineering work that’d be though.
But I do see “Mcnesium” stats in the list, and I’m not him, though…