It’s also super easy to add custom user fields at /admin/customize/user_fields and make them required at signup (which displays them on the registration form).
My problem is that I want to add EXISTING fields (location, website) to be part of the signup form. I know how to create additional fields “location” and “website”, but that just creates confusion, plus I lose the neat way location and website are currently displayed in the user card. Is it possible to add the existing fields to the signup?
No, AFAIK that’s not possible at present. They aren’t really typical questions to ask users when they sign up for a community, the norm here is to get users through the door, then let them populate their profile at their leisure at some point in the future.
If you really want users to update those fields you could consider using data explorer to find users with blank fields, then reach out to them to encourage a profile update via discourse-bcc.
Thank you, even if it’s not the answer I was hoping for. In another community I made the experience that 90% of users don’t fill out the profile fields and wouldn’t even know where (it requires many clicks: avatar -> wheel -> preferences -> profile, and “account” acts like a decoy, people think those are all the fields they can fill out). For this new community it’s vital that we get everyone’s location, so we have to include it in the sign-up process somehow.
Don’t forget that you’re already collecting registration and last used IPs, so you can already infer geography to a degree from that kind of data.
You can also create opt-in groups for each geographic region. If your users benefit from you knowing their whereabouts then it shouldn’t be a hard sell.
Finally you can provide direct generic links to the user profile for them to visit directly. Discourse has a special /my/ path which will take users to their specific page.