Displaying the About (Biography) Section In Your PM Community Profile

[SD08]

Recently, a fellow community member messaged me about adding a note in the "About" section of their profile page, like I have.  This section of the profile is edited by going to:  My Settings -> Personal Information -> Biography

Anything entered into the Biography box then appears in your profile About section, just above your list of Latest Posts.

For community members who have filled in the About section in your profiles for the benefit of anyone viewing your page, I'm just alerting you that it may not be visible to other members, depending on your community account privacy setting, which hides that section by default.  Of course, you can see it yourself if you are always logged into your community account on your own device, so you might not be aware that it could actually be invisible to the public.  This was the case for the member previously mentioned, until I pointed it out to them.

Here is the relevant privacy setting which affects this:

My Settings -> Preferences -> Privacy -> Show Private Information In Profile To

This controls the visibility of the About section as well as your Friends list, Name, Title, Location and Personal Webpage and needs to be set to All in order for the community to see any of those.  Unfortunately, these are all grouped together for this setting and there is no way to show or hide About without also showing/hiding the other details.  You'll just have to decide which is more important to show or hide.

The surest way to test your settings is by viewing your profile while logged out, which is easily done by concurrently viewing it in a separate browser window in private/incognito mode, even as you tweak the settings.

[srlawren]

You can also leave most of the fields in the public section blank. If you look at my profile for example, you won't see a name listed at all since I left the first and last name fields blank.  Just sayin'.

[will13am]

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@Anonymous wrote:

Thanks SD08. I didn't know it wasn't visible.

Yes it exposes your name and location also.

I have a fake name in there anyway. And I've already mentioned my location in the forum. And then yes there's the About. If anybody cares.

I don't have any friends

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Make/fake some friends.  Just pick some members and add them as friends.  It is not like you have to tell them that you did it.  Back in the day when moderator_team was not used to contact moderators, we used the friend feature to quickly see which moderators were online so that we can message the ones at work that day to speed up the turnaround time even though they could see each other's messages.  So it is kind of a creepy feature. 

[Anonymous]

Thanks SD08. I didn't know it wasn't visible.

Yes it exposes your name and location also.

I have a fake name in there anyway. And I've already mentioned my location in the forum. And then yes there's the About. If anybody cares.

I don't have any friends