Other profile fields

[AdmiralJota]

Are there other things that people would like to be able to see on profile pages, as part of the default set of fields?

Personally, I'd like to add "Homepage" at some point, although that will require doing some careful work to sanitize the URL that gets entered.

Would "Location" (as a free text field) be useful?

Another thing we could do is to optionally allow people to include a year with their birthday, so that their profile can dynamically display their current age if they so choose. But I'm not sure if there's a good way for the UI to clearly indicate "you can specify month/day without a year if you want, or you can give month/day/year, or you can just leave it all blank" without shoehorning in an awkward explanatory note.

[irilyth]

I suggested this on #1068: Allow people to supply arbitrary key-value pairs describing themselves. Then we don't have to come up with an Official List TM of what keys we think are Important TM, and people can specify their gender identiy, gender expresion, biological sex, attraction, hair color, eye color, t-shirt size, and anything else they feel like.

Anything that the site's actually going to use, we might want to have in a structured way. Anything that's just informational -- like homepage, location, birthday, etc -- I say just let people supply whatever they want.

[AdmiralJota]

I'm in favor of allowing key-value pairs, but arbitrary inputs and fixed inputs serve slightly different purposes: Arbitrary key-value pairs let you specify things that you want to share that not everyone might think to wonder about, but the fixed fields support things that people might wonder about but which others might not think to specify.

E.g., if there were just key-value pairs, I probably wouldn't think to add one for Location for myself. And so if there are lots of folks out there who are curious where on the globe everyone is, I'd be disappointing them. But on the other hand, if there were an explicit field for it, I'd be happy to say that I'm in NH, thus making everyone happy. (Except maybe for the people who wished I were somewhere other than NH.)

[irilyth]

Fair enough; how about if the UI were a drop-down menu of keys (ones we came up with, ones other people came up with, whatever), with "Other" or "Custom" or sometihng as an option?

Also, one way people might get the idea to add Location (or whatever) to their profile is if they look at the profile of someone else who has it. :^)

[irilyth]

Google Contacts uses the approach I described (I knew I'd seen it somewhere): You can select keys from a menu, or type in your own.

[AdmiralJota]

The dropdown of suggestions for arbitrary keys sounds good to me; it'll let us have as many suggestions as we want without worrying about them taking up tons of space on the preferences and profile pages (unless the user chooses to add them).

So, homepage wouldn't be part of the dropdown, since it should be handled specially as a link. Likewise, age needs special handling because it's dynamic, and if we include it, it should be based off of your birthdate.

But these seem like possible candidates for the list:

• Location
• Occupation
• Orientation
• Hair color
• Eye color
• T-shirt size
• Favorite color
• Favorite food

And of course, a user can add anything else that they want to share as an arbitrary key/value as well.

Is there anything else that would be good to add to that list, from a getting-to-know-you perspective? Or is there anything there so far that seems inappropriate?

[irilyth]

This has been on my mind a little recently, in the context of Mad Robin, where I sometimes want to say things like " has two games remaining; if she wins both of them, he'll move up to Division Q, whereas if he loses one and wins the other, etc etc" and it'd be nice to say she or he or whatever the person's preferred pronouns are.

So, I wondered if there was a ticket about pronouns, and found this one, which I think is the right one, but the list of things that Jota suggested in the previous comment does not in fact include pronouns, so I'd like to suggest adding "Preferred pronouns for me" to the list.

[irilyth]

Ah, agreed, #1737 is covered by this -- I thought we had talked about it before, but couldn't find this ticket for some reason. Thanks!

Should we remove the "question" label from this ticket, or is the next step still more discussion?

[blackshadowshade]

I'll remove it for the moment, and when I get around to dealing with it (or someone requests it as a BFotM), we can start up discussion again.