Profile Fields?

[Martin]

I think I'm safe in saying that owners would love the ability to add profile fields in the CP, so I won't address that one as it's already been covered.

What I would like to address, though, is the default profile fields.

I would like to see, in addition to what is already there, a Gender field and a Date of Birth field.

The Date of Birth field could replace the annoying COPPA page when you go to register by parsing the DOB against the server date to automatically determine where the person falls in the COPPA laws and redirect accordingly, plus could be used by admins to generate a Birthday list so topics could be started or cards could be sent. Maybe an industrious haccker could even come up a way to auto-generate the Birthday topics?;)

The gender field is just plain needed:)

Also, while I like the biography field, it would be nice to have each of the things there listed by line-item rather than clustered.
Then the search could be expanded to find people of similar interests, in your area, etc, etc.

Just some thoughts...

Anyone else have any fields they would like to see added to the defaults?

[Martin]

I just think that since this is the first release of the program, as much of what the users want should be put in to make the program more perfect, hacking less neccessary and upgrades soooooooo much easier :)

[John]

I'll see about getting this into a future version as it seems to be a fairly popular request!

John

[Craig Antill]

John,
Just out surfing around and looking at what people have on their various forums. I ran across Charles Capps' hacked forum (whatever happened to him - I thought he was all up for vBulletin ?) and thought you might be interested in seeing his user profile page - might give you some ideas ?

http://flare.solareclipse.net/cgi/ubbmisc.cgi?action=getbio&UserName=Charles+Capps

I particularly like the ability for a user to display a photo of themselves - would be very handy in the case of our forum, as we have a forum setup for members who wish to meet up trackside. Half the time we haven't a clue who the hell we're looking for when we're supoosed to meet :)

In addition, have you seen the Yahoo Clubs' profiles ? Very nice indeed - the ability to list more than one URL is good too :)

http://profiles.yahoo.com/Craig_Antill

[Martin]

Since he's been reinstated as a mod at infopop, I doubt you'll see much support from him in this forum. I may be wrong, but I don't think so...

On the pictures, Yes, that would definitely be nice. The question I have, though, is do you allow upload to control size and weight, or just link and force it to display in a certain height/width format like they do at wwwthreads?
The problem with the first is that it could consume a lot space that people might not have.
The problem with the second is that if people link to huge images, it's going to cause severe load time problems.

My personal preference (since I have my own server that this is going to be run on) is to allow uploads, but a lot of people are virtually hosted and can't afford the disk space for thousands of member photos.
Would the possibility of a control panel option for upload or link be too much to hope for? What about an upload version and a link version?

[Edited by Martin on 04-21-2000 at 06:57 PM]

[Craig Antill]

Strange boy, our Charles ;)

Anyway, serious business. I'd vote against a user upload facility, unless each image was limited to something about 3k per image :p

[Martin]

I would prefer an upload facility and be able to set the parameters of the images being uploaded.

with upload, you could also have custom user icons of about 32x32 with a 2k limit, you could put image sigs in and disable it as part of the sig, and a whole slew of other options:)

I'd almost be willing to bet that this would fall almost perfectly along the lines of who has their own server and who doesn't:)

I *do* think it's a great idea, no matter how it's implememnted, I just prefer to have more control:)

[werehere]

Of course I would not mind as long as I had control to turn it off, but I would not use it, and yes I do have a dedicated server.

Just no need to use such a feature on my forum, not that it could not, or should not be a feature of the software however;)

[Parker Clack]

I would like to see a location profile added to the defaults too.

Parker

[shri]

I second the recommendation for location field.

City, State, Country

From an admin perspective, it would be cool to be able to then get stats about where your registrations are from.

[evoir]

Why not allow up to say....10 fields, and we can decide what they are, if they show up etc.

This would keep most people happy. I know that I am likely to use the membership as a standard member database for our site...so being abole to do custom fields (not as a hack) would ROCK.

(including a image upload to profile--but keep it admin defineable in size and toggle on off..)

Anyway. Just my thoughts, something that is really lacking in UBB. And something that has been frustrating.

Later,
keep up the good work!

[Edited by evoir on 05-01-2000 at 04:18 PM]

[Skut]

Hey,
Yup custom fields would be absolutely rock (I know it's any easy hack, but)they would probably wed me to VBulletin for quite some time.
A forum is the first interactive element I intend to put on my site, as I'm sure it is for many. Part of the lure of a forum is the ability to gather as much valuable user info, as the customers(product) is willing to part with.
So, providing custom registration options is a must for most users who have already generated traffic and are looking at forums from a customer harvesting point of view.
I think it would be a very saleable feature of VBulletin - Heh! - suddenly you're producing customer relationship management software - DOH!
Thanks

Skut

[shri]

Yep, custom fields would also allow us to store the users Avatars!

The next hack I'm workin on...

[Menno]

wooh, an avatar hack, can't wait :)

As for profile fields, I don't really need them myself, but it wou;d be a nice feature to have

[Brian]

My solution for allowing people to put more of their info was to give free web accounts to people. I did this through http://www.northsky.com. You can see it @ http://signup.elitecaraudio.org

-Brian