I wish we had profiles!
A lot of sites have it so you can click on someone’s user name and taken to their profile - it may list the last 10 or 20 posts by the person or which threads they are active in. They may have an interesting website to share, and avatar or picture so we can see how lovely we are (or what our favorite flower or cartoon character is, lol, if one doesn’t post photos of themselves on the internet, that should be ok too).
Not every site has private messaging, but that would be so useful - sometimes you want to say something to someone about their post or just say hi, nice to talk to you. You might have a question to them but you don’t want to “threadjack,” so you take it to PM, and we can share email addresses without posting them publicly or having to ask you to send that along to them when you have a spare second. The larger the community gets, and the longer some of us have been here and plan to stay, it only feels natural to become friends with them outside the bounds of our forum posts. With the matters of privacy, I don’t share my last name, or most of the names of my family members in a public forum, or where to send me a letter. I share that info on a one-to-one basis, but not somewhere anyone can do an internet search.
We also have a place here for our own “stuff,” and we can make things like our lists public - but if we had profiles, you can see some specific person’s lists, if you want to know their tastes, and they have them set to public.
Right now, the lists don’t seem to do a lot of good - you can record them for yourself, and then if someone is looking up a name, they can see it is on some people’s lists. Unless you put your name in the name of your list, you can’t tell whose list it is, so it can be uninteresting to click on a random list called “Names I like” - a lot of lists are like that. [name]Jill[/name], who made a thread because she can’t get her lists named, and I imagine others having trouble naming their lists, makes it hard to spot someone’s list on the list of lists! Bleh, hard to get it out!
Can’t do a search on “[name]Karen[/name]'s Lists” and see the lists I’ve made. At least if I could click on a name, I could see someone’s lists, whether they are titled or not.
Anyway, I just see a lot of frustration here about not being able to interact and make friends, or to connect on a personal level. I think all or some of these profile abilities would be appreciated.
Thanks!
I’m still in mourning over not being able to name my lists. 