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Comments on What information should be displayed on a network profile?
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What information should be displayed on a network profile?
I want to design a network profile (and then possibly implement it). There was already discussion about that in Community dropdown and profile information, Understanding how posts were possibly received by the community --- network wide and there is an issue with when single site accounts should be created and a discussion about user preferences.
Here I want to present my thoughts on the network profile and ask you for your feedback on them. What would you like to have on a network profile?
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Ways to access the network profile: from each site profile and from codidact.com/users/12345
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Available tabs when it's another user: Profile, Activity, Vote Summary (as in the site profile)
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Additional available tabs when it's me: Account, Edit, Preferences
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Content of the Profile tab: top-left: a free text field and some links like for the site profile, below a list/table of all communities where the user has an account with links to their site profiles and statistics (number of questions, answers, edits, votes, reputation). Possibly sortable by name of community or stats mentioned above. On the right side the avatar and a summary (total number of questions, answers, edits, comments, votes across the whole network).
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Content of the Activity tab: same as for the site profiles only with content from all sites of course
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Content of the Vote Summary tab: same as for the site profiles only with content from all sites of course
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Content of the Account tab: I'm not sure, do we have site specific accounts here or is there only a network wide account, if so, that Account tab should vanish from the site profiles and only appear on the network profile
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Content of the Edit tab: I'm not sure, do we have the ability to have a different profile for each site?, if yes, maybe we could use the network profile as a way to copy text quickly to all site profiles if needed, but do we really need a unique profile text section/avatar for each site? If it's not unique, it should be moved from the site profile to the network profile.
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Content of the Preferences tab: The site profiles' preferences tabs have network preferences and local community preferences. Simply split them and put the network preferences on the network profile's preferences tab.
Some questions I asked myself while designing this:
- Do Activity and Vote Summary need to be separate tabs? One could call it History instead and then have filters and sorting on it or expand the number of tabs into a larger list (questions, answers, ...).
- Do you need to have a profile page text and avatar image that is specific for each community? Why not, I'd say, but then with potentially tens of communities this might be a nightmare to manage.
- Is there one account (email/password) for the whole network or one account for each site?
- What else would be nice?
I thought the best way to respond to this answer would be with a sketch. The answer raises a few key points: - Sho …
6mo ago
I would like to see a place that links to the sites I care about, and therefore want to check in on regularly. I curr …
2y ago
> Do Activity and Vote Summary need to be separate tabs? One could call it History instead and then have filters and sor …
2y ago
> Is there one account (email/password) for the whole network or one account for each site? There is one account for …
2y ago
Post
Is there one account (email/password) for the whole network or one account for each site?
There is one account for the whole network. Profiles on individual communities are auto-created when you visit a community for the first time while logged in.
It would take some work to create separate profiles on each community, so before we do that I'd want to have a discussion about the benefits. It sounds like the main thing people would like to be able to vary per-community is the "about" text. Since we now have community-specific preferences (we didn't when profiles were first implemented), there might be a way to allow per-community "about" text without creating separate profiles. (I'm speculating; I haven't asked.)
As you surmised, the Edit and Account settings are network-wide. (Account is stuff like passwords and 2FA; Edit is to edit the stuff shown in the profile.) While these are network-wide and should be editable from the network profile, let's be careful about removing them from the per-community profiles. For someone who joins and participates in one community here, the experience should be coherent.
One possibility is to mirror those tabs (like they're mirrored on all communities now) on the network profile -- you can edit those fields from anywhere. Another is to provide paths from the community profiles to the network profile where those can be edited -- and also provide a path back. I suspect the redundancy of having them everywhere will be easier and less confusing than centralizing them, but that's just my gut feeling and maybe I'm wrong. (In other words: just my opinion, not a directive from the staff.)
We should probably add some text to those pages to the effect that the changes you make here apply across the network.
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