What information do you think should be available on Member profiles? In some instances, I guess it will be site-dependent, but on the whole what do you think (or even have available) for your members to share via their profiles? Most forum softwares come with the ability to write little messages on profiles, see the typical DOB, Location, website info, Facebook, Twitter etc but what else do you think should be visible or simply would be a nice addition?
I dont think the users exact location on the forum should be visible for example, Michael was last seen viewing such and such a thread, if members seen an admin viewing a thread that was questionable but didnt make a decision yet and left the thread without a word, someone could see that from their profile which I dont think people should be able to do to some extent. With XenForo though I think that a friend feature would be good in replacement of the follow feature, like a switch for us to choose between the two, following can be hard to explain and the vast majority of sites have a friends feature, I know many think theyre pointless as people on forums are hardly your best buds most of the time but I like them still and I think follow is too Twittery to me.
I honestly like the follow system. I dislike the friends system bc it asks for a reciprocal friending. For me, I don't want to befriend all the people that think it's cool to friend me on my site. And at the same time, I don't want to know what they are all up to. I have made it default to ask permission to add reciprocal friending on my IPB site just so I can "follow" people essentially and get updates on them when available. As for what to show on profiles...I'm not a big fan of sharing things on sites. I think it's bad to link to personal things like fb and possibly twitter. There are so many bad people on the internet these days and if you use your name on multiple sites and share things differently on each site, people can find those easily. An example...I found a designer that was in a logo contest I hosted...I didn't pick him bc I was stupid and to pick him after the bat would cost me another $500 just to get in contact with him. I did some searching and found his twitter, flickr and facebook accounts, and messaged him and worked out a deal for our current logo. Another example...kids on my site had found my myspace and ebay account, both had contained a few personal things so I've since deleted my myspace (never actually used it) and changed my name and stuff on ebay. I think just sticking with Instant Messengers, homepage, and a few other non-personal things people wouldn't mind sharing is good enough (along with commenting system of course).
I'm not a fan of the friending setup on vB (3.x) myself. Default reciprocality, binary status (friend or non-friend), and the ask-permission parts just don't mesh for me. Following on XF works better in my mind because it doesn't require asking my permission and I really don't mind if people follow me around (won't get them much on my forum; 90% of my posts are in supermoderator/administrator coordination forums or our help desk and the rest are the occasional exposition or a discussion of some core game system concept with them in our forum designated for those discussions). People know my Facebook and are welcome to friend me, especially now that Facebook adopted the Google+ style partitioning of friends. I don't talk about much that's intensely personal on Facebook/Google+/Twitter anyway; you could probably extrapolate where I have worked if you combed my friends list and correlated some data (or ran into my LinkedIn account and managed to be within the necessary degrees of separation), but it's not data I outright supply otherwise. This is probably also a legacy of the fact that I'm a gay male who worked in a vertical that's not very gay-friendly, though.
Its about your site. A gaming site might allow their users to sync their steam accounts, then use the steam APIs to pull and show data about that user on their profiles. A site like conquer club, which is based around a RISK clone you can play online and built on top of phpbb has rankings/medals on display and tons of information like ratings on each player and their life time stats. "Art forums" might have the ability to display a portfolio or list of videos on your profile somewhere... Some sites don't even need complicated profiles, just information like IM/facebook would be enough for them. It depends on a lot of factors. Add what you need, toss out what you don't.
