New! Smarter profile creation and syncing

Question

We've made some changes to profile editing. The TL;DR is:

1. We now encourage users to set a name and picture during signup. If you sign up with Google or Facebook, we pull them in and let you edit them before you create an account.

2. We've made editing your profile across multiple Stack Exchange sites easier:

   a. Profile editing now defaults to saving everywhere, and syncs much faster (<5 seconds, where before it would take up to 5 minutes)

   b. If you've customized your profile on different sites, you can now sync only your changes to all sites (so you can avoid overwriting customizations if you need to e.g. change your email address)

Now, a bit more detail and a quick word on why.

New User Signup

As part of our efforts to clean up the homepage of Stack Overflow, we noticed that a large percentage (~60%) of new users had no name or avatar -- the ubiquitous "user1859302". While this can be used as a signal of a low quality post, in general it's bad for the site because it makes it look like nobody cares, the opposite of an expert community. When they're common on the homepage or in search results, it becomes something of a broken window.

So, we now encourage users to set their username and avatar during signup. To make it even easier, if you sign up with Google or Facebook we'll pull in your name and picture and let you edit them before you create an account. Since we've turned them on, these changes have reduced the number of nameless users from about 60% to less than 3%.

Here's what it looks like, for the curious:

Note that we don't store your image unless you confirm that you want it, and you're free to change both the image and display name and go back to being "user19580329" if you really want.

Profile Editing

The old profile edit page gave you two options: save your profile for this site (the default) or copy all your changes everywhere in the network. This caused two problems:

1. Most users didn't want to customize their profile on every site. The default was wrong, and the thing they wanted to do (just update it everywhere) was a big scary "Copy changes to all Stack Exchange sites" button.

2. The users who did want to customize their profile, often didn't want to customize all of it, just one or two fields. If they ever accidentally clicked that "Copy changes..." button, it would blow away all their customizations.

So, we made it a bit more intelligent. Here's the original spec which basically outlines how it works:

Basically, the system now assumes that most users just want to have one profile everywhere and makes that the default. If you want to customize, it's now a bit easier to find and when you make changes only those changes will be copied everywhere so you don't have to worry about losing all your other customizations.

To make this even work, we fixed up the syncing process so that it happens nearly instantly across all the sites. This gets rid of the 5 minute delay when you save changes on one site before they show up across the network.

That's it! Try it out and let us know what you think.

Credit: m0sa on the profile editing and Anna Lear on the signup changes.

Answer 1

You forgot one thing: allow birthdays before 1920/01/01 in the profile. Please consider allowing it, because my birthday is 1914/05/29.

And, by the way, are you planning to make the mobile version of profile editor?

Answer 2

Can I please have a button to copy changes to all sites I haven't customized?

The reason I ask for this is because I have (partially) customized "about me" text on a few sites. Currently, to preserve those customizations when editing my default "about me" text, I need to:

1. remember which sites I had customized my "about me" text on,
2. open the profile editor in a new tab for all those sites,
3. edit my default profile (on some site I haven't customized) and copy the changes to all sites, and
4. re-save the customized "about me" text, possibly after some manual editing, on all the sites where I wasn't using the default.

This is, honestly, a pain in the ass. When I started reading the post above, I was really happy, because I thought the new features described there would solve that problem. Alas, they don't seem to: I can still only change my "about me" text either on just one site, or on all of them.

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In fact, let me go a little bit further. What I'd really want to have is a place (say, my network profile on stackexchange.com) where I can set up a default profile that automatically gets shown on all SE sites, except for those where I've customized it. That is, the display logic should work like this:

• Have I entered a custom value for this field on this site? If yes, show that.
• Else, have I entered default value for this field in my network profile? If yes, show that.
• Else show nothing.

Also, when editing a per-site profile, there should be a way (say, a link/button) to reset a particular field to the "default" state. (This probably should be a distinct state from "empty", since I might want to hide a particular default value on some sites. That said, if this would be prohibitively difficult to implement, I could live without it.) When editing, the default state should be visually distinct in some way; for example, the default content of the field could be styled as gray "placeholder" text.

Also, obviously, there would need to be some kind of an "edit default profile" link on the per-site profile editing page, so that users can easily discover this feature. It would also be nice if, when editing the default profile, any fields that I've customized on some site would have a small notice about that, and maybe some way to easily reset those customizations.

Answer 3

It would be nice to know a bit more about the technical side of how this works, and whether it might discourage new users from signing up with OpenID. Presumably when you attempt to sign up with Google or Facebook now, you'll get a prompt that the SE site you're signing up on wants to see not just your email address, but also your real name and profile picture (and possibly other data). Is this correct? Is there a way for users to sign up using OpenID while opting out of this information sharing, without having to trust that SE is going to do the right thing and discard the data if the user chooses not to use it?