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I would like to have a history of the "About me" box in my profile.

I edited my details on my profile page and it replaced all profiles with the same content, so I'd like to be able to go back to the old information.

Having a complete history of all information would be of use to moderators.

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  • 16
    (This history would also be useful when moderators have to change something. Records are good.)
    – Ry- Mod
    Commented Sep 16, 2013 at 2:01
  • 1
    @minitech You can use Google cache to retrieve (as I am doing now) recent changes, but it becomes quit tricky when you your name changes because the URL changes http://unix.stackexchange.com/users/0000/oldname to http://unix.stackexchange.com/users/0000/newname therefore a search for cache:http://unix.stackexchange.com/users/0000/newname does't work.
    – William
    Commented Sep 16, 2013 at 2:15
  • I left an important link on my profile description, and then I accidentally removed it. I hope I will be able to recover the link from the profile's revision history.
    – Anderson Green
    Commented Sep 29, 2013 at 5:23
  • Such thing currently doesn't exist, so it's a feature request. @AndersonGreen I doubt there's any revision history in the database, your data is most likely lost.
    – Shadow Wizard
    Commented Sep 29, 2013 at 8:53
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    @AndersonGreen try the Internet Archive Wayback Machine: web.archive.org/web/20121227062930/http://stackoverflow.com/…, it captured your SO profile a few times every month since Mai 12, chances are good you can recover it from there if the link has been in your profile for a while.
    – kapex
    Commented Sep 29, 2013 at 11:58
  • I also found a duplicate of this question: Is there a profile revision history?
    – Anderson Green
    Commented Sep 29, 2013 at 21:21
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    @kapep There is still a bounty on this question, so you should post your comment as an answer.
    – Anderson Green
    Commented Oct 3, 2013 at 17:45
  • @AndersonGreen thanks for reminding me! I made the answer a bit more general for future visitors.
    – kapex
    Commented Oct 3, 2013 at 18:26
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    @kapep nice, those are pretty easy 300 or 150 points! ;)
    – Shadow Wizard
    Commented Oct 3, 2013 at 20:45
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    +1. I had site specific About Me's on two sites (travel and amateur radio), and one techie profile from StackOverflow which I'm happy to propagate to the numerous other Stack sites I have accounts at. Unfortunately, updating the About Me for all sites overwrote at the 2 sites which have a different About Me. (Entirely logical of course). In future I will have to remember to save any "custom" About Mes before updating my network profile, but it would have been really handy here to have a revision history.
    – Stephen Kennedy
    Commented Oct 27, 2014 at 19:02
  • status-declined
    – iBug says Reinstate Monica
    Commented Dec 13, 2017 at 2:37
  • @iDebug Are you asking me to add that tag?
    – William
    Commented Dec 13, 2017 at 3:19
  • @William You surely can't. It's a moderator tag that can only be added/removed by a ♦. By that I mean this will likely be declined.
    – iBug says Reinstate Monica
    Commented Dec 13, 2017 at 3:20
  • @Ry-: When a mod edits a user's "About me" section, a revision history entry is stored for that change. This diff is linked from the user history page that mods can access. (I'm guessing that wasn't always the case.)
    – V2Blast Staff
    Commented Jul 28, 2022 at 23:47

1 Answer 1

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+300

The Internet Archive’s Wayback Machine captures profiles every now and then.

Use a profile's url and choose any date to show the content of the profile from that time. It's not a complete revision history though and you will still need some luck finding a particular revision, especially if that revision has been online only for a short time.

It's not really clear when the profile page will be crawled. Some captures are only days apart while sometimes there are no captures for weeks or months. The FAQ says it can take some month until a site's captured version will appear.

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  • Hmm, could work, maybe, but I keep getting, "Hrm. Wayback Machine doesn't have that page archived."
    – anonymous2
    Commented Nov 10, 2016 at 23:05

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