User profile fields

The user profile is the object containing information about a particular user. What shall we store? How do we store it? How do we show it? How do we collect it?

Discuss here.


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My utopia is that it’s just a key-value store with each key having a list of aspects which it’s visible to. And no, keys shouldn’t be unique either, so you can define the same key with different values depending on the visibility. We could then provide some default keys which translate automagically. However this can quickly become a UX nightmare and isn’t easy to do on the server and federation side too.

Proposal: Store user name in a single field

Currently in the database we have two values concerning the user name:

  • First Name
  • Last Name

This does not fit in to all cultures and since our sign-up wizard only asks for one name (which is saved to First Name field), this has created a bug https://github.com/diaspora/diaspora/issues/3648

I propose that we only store one Name field for a user by removing Last Name and renaming First Name. If this affects federation, we should push this refactoring out in a suitable version.

Some comments already on this in the bug comments.


Outcome: Motion passed

Votes:

  • Yes: 8
  • Abstain: 0
  • No: 0
  • Block: 0

Note: This proposal was imported from Loomio. Vote details, some comments and metadata were not imported. Click here to view the proposal with all details on Loomio.

I don’t have any problem with there being two fields, but if it is causing a genuine issue for others, I can’t see any problem with changing it to just one name field, so I’m happy to go with whatever the majority decision is.

Who gets to define which keys are used in profiles? I feel like this should be a Podmin task, as it would enforce a consistency across the entire pod but still allow users to have some customization of their profile. Considering how much easier it’s become to get a pod up and running now than ever before, I feel like this bit of customization may inspire users to move off of joindiaspora.com and onto their own pod, which was kind-of the intention behind that big “central” pod in the first place.

What do you guys think? Is giving users this freedom detrimental to the UX of the profile page?

Customization is good, but for federation some key elements need to be standard.