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Profile

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Your Profile

Your MetaFilter profile, or user page, is your own personal space on the site, which shows your activity across Metafilter and all of its subsites. Links to your contacts can also be found there.

You can add images, links, and text, as well as send an internal email note (known colloquially as MeMail) to another user. All the personal information fields are optional; you can include as much or as little information as you want.

It used to be possible to use CSS to further customize the profile page, but that capability has been disabled by Matt Haughey due to security concerns. Any profiles that had already been customized with CSS are "grandfathered" and retain their customizations. Once edits are made to customized pages, however, they revert to non-customised pages.

Your profile page will be visible to anyone who clicks on your name whilst reading the site. The following information is viewable to non-members:

  • Name
  • Social Media ("Also On") links (but only if you have the visibility there set to "Everyone")
  • Joined date
  • Flickr, Twitter and last.fm.
  • About blurb
  • Picture
  • Your website. May also be seen at the links.mefi page

Everything else on the profile page is members-only. Also, your email address is only visible to members if you've elected for it to be so.

Although Matt Haughey eventually set the robots.txt to prevent Google from caching user pages, they are still indexed, making your Metafilter identity only scantily private. Your e-mail address will only be visible to other registered members, to prevent harvesting by automated spam bots.

Profiles pages include a space for Social Apps, a way for you to show where you're contributing at social networks on the Web. Approximately 100 social websites are available to choose from.

As of December 2005, if you enter the latitude and longitude of your location, other nearby users will be displayed on your profile page, in addition to a Google map showing their locations (and your ID will be displayed on others). This replaces the previous system which used U.S. postal ZIP codes to show U.S. users located near each other.

As of April 2011, clicking on the birthday field in one's profile will show other users who have entered the same birthday into their profiles.

There are two ways to access your user page.

  • First is by user number. The syntax for this is http://www.metafilter.com/user.mefi/{number}.
  • Second is by user name. The syntax for this is http://www.metafilter.com/username.mefi/{name} or http://www.metafilter.com/username/{name}.

Notable Profile Pages

Mods

Users

MeFi Miscellany

This page predates the Wiki and FAQ and collect Metafilter community information.

MetaTalk threads on interesting user pages

More Information about Profile Page Fields

  1. text size and font face for normal and small size text
  2. links, whether to always underline them and whether to open them in new windows
  3. "show DHTML titles" yes or no
  4. theme selection: plain (black/blue text on a white background in MetaFilter) or regular (green/tan text on a blue background)
  5. timezone, name, url
  6. email address. This is only shown to logged in MetaFilter users, if you choose. It's a good idea to have a way to be contacted by other MeFites to avoid flame wars and aid in SelfPolicing. Some MeFites have a mailto link on a linked website instead. MattHaughey and Jessamyn can also see the email address you used when you signed up. If you do not provide any email address at all, you are still able to contribute on MetaFilter but you will not be able to be contacted.
  7. Blurb area. This has historically been used to include other information but also to provide a custom stylesheet for the page. MattHaughey disabled custom stylesheets for security reasons. Users who have custom stylesheets will lose them if they update their user page information.
  8. optional fields, used to add more personal information. The lat/long feature is still being worked out, but should be able to show you a map of other MeFites near you. The occupation fields were once pulled out to show a list of the professions of all the MeFites (anyone have a link) and the AIM/ICQ boxes will become links to those services when your profile is saved.
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