Whilst this isn’t directly related to this plugin, the availability of this plugin raises the following:
You know it would be nice if these were two separate settings?
Plenty of users might want to expose their profile whilst not appearing to be present?
Agreed, it might be nice to split them. Certainly #pr-welcome if someone would like to work on it.
Otherwise, I’ll see what I can do when we come to rewrite the plugin. It’s still on my list to do… just keeps getting pushed down by other tasks that pop up.
There’s actually another problematic “feature” with the Hide my public profile and presence features profile setting which currently makes it (unintentionally, I believe) much harder to message someone who chooses that setting, since it removes the message button from user cards:
Mind there’s a separate setting for disabling messages, but this is being caused by the Hide my public profile and presence features one. I don’t think one wanting to hide profile and/or presence means necessarily that one doesn’t want to receive messages (as easily, that is). Anyway, sorry for bringing this off-topic.
Back on topic and, for what’s worth, we are using this plugin (which we 
) on a fairly active forum (~140 concurrent online) and look forward for some optimizations. I’m not a Rubyist, but happy to help in any other way I can (feedback, benchmarks, etc).
Just came to the forum to report exactly this issue. On a forum where I’m moderator I just got a response “wanted to send you a direct message, but your profile is hidden so this seems impossible”.
Its Presence I want to opt out of, but my profile must be visible to all members as well as have the DM button on the popup dialog.
This is a bit of an issue for us too right now, as well as for a few others:
I would love to see these split as well. I have community members that would want to show their profile but not necessarily wish for people to know when they’re online.
Example: Coworkers that also visit our site.
+1 — those are two different things.