I noticed that, unlike my profile on every SE site, when I push the profile changes to stackexchange.com, there are no links and nothing is clickable. This appears to be by design, as an anti-spam measure.
Although it may reduce spam, it renders my SE network profile useless. I primarily use SE for professional sites, so I link to my LinkedIn and Stack Overflow Career profiles in my About Me. I also link to a public Amazon Wishlist and PayPal donation link (yes, I've made about $5 from what I'm guessing is Stack Exchange). However, all of these are dead on the main SE profile.
Externally, I tend to link to my SE profile instead of individual site profiles. Since I'm in software development, I prefer to link to one profile instead of five profiles (Software Engineering, Stack Overflow, Project Management, SQA and Testing, The Workplace). However, it means that anyone who comes into this link sees mention of a profile on LinkedIn or Stack Overflow Careers as well as a way to give me things for my contributions and can't do anything.
This renders my SE profile mostly useless. It links to all of my SE accounts, but people can't use my profile to find me on other services as I intend. If anyone were to find it referenced somewhere, they would hit a small blocker. That, to me, defeats the point of a profile.
I understand the need for anti-spam measures, but the only way to pull a profile is to pull it from an existing SE site. Reputation should be considered. I'm not sure what the right thing to do is, but either reputation on the network should be considered and if it meets a threshold, links should be enabled. Alternately, reputation information should come from the site where the profile is pulled from and if it meets a threshold, links should be enabled.
Regardless, a fully functional cross-site profile is essential to me to effectively use SE as a small part of a portfolio.
