The issue of user profiles being hidden for non-staff members on a Discourse forum was traced to the Custom Profile Link theme component. KhoiUSA discovered that when a user field configured by the component is set to not be visible on the public profile, the entire profile becomes inaccessible to non-staff users. A workaround is to make the user field visible on the public profile, which restores normal profile access. The problem does not occur in safe mode, confirming it is theme-related. After testing, KhoiUSA confirmed the component was the culprit and temporarily disabled it before re-enabling it with the corrected setting. JammyDodger suggested converting the topic from Product Support to bug and encouraged updating the original post with findings and repro steps — which KhoiUSA agreed to do. This behavior appears to be a bug in the theme component’s handling of hidden user fields.
UPDATE: The issue is with the Custom Profile Link theme component. When a user field is set to not being visible on the public profile, the theme component manages to hide the entire profile. A workaround is to set the user field to be visible on the public profile.
I’ve just realized that on my Discourse forum, users who are not moderators or administrators are unable to view each others profiles, they can only view their own profiles. Below is an example.
Is this a site setting that I am missing? These users did not opt to hide their profile and presence options in their interface settings.
If anybody can help or knows about this issue, please help me out, Thanks.
It doesn’t happen in safe mode, thanks for the tip! Let me try disabling all my theme components and re-enabling them one by one to see which one is the troublemaker.
Alright, I was able to narrow the issue down to the Custom Profile Link theme component. I have since disabled it and now the profiles are operating normally.
EDIT: This only occurs when the User Field for the theme component is set to where it is not shown on the profile. I have now made it visible on the profile and re-enabled the theme component, it is now operating normally. This does seem to be a bug though.
But if you could edit your findings and some repro steps into the OP that would be 
