Make clear which profile data is visible to whom

Question

Looking at my own profile and the edit profile form, it isn't really clear to me which data will be publicly displayed/visible to registered users/visible to mods and which won't.

When I look at users who have recently been awarded the Autobiographer badge, I can only see name, member for, seen, website, location and age.

Here's a few points that could help in this matter:

• On "my own profile", display a little lock symbol (e.g. this) next to entries that are only visible to me (or mods).
• On the edit profile page,
  • make note of the use of the data put in next to the field, e.g. tell the user that the birthday will not be displayed, but used to calculate the age, the e-mail-address won't be shown and only used for certain purposes (which should be named?)
  • sort the fields in "public" and "private".
• In the Autobiographer badge description, clarify if a field like "real name" needs to be filled in in order to get the badge.

Answer 1

I agree this still is very unclear. Like in Why are some profile fields (contents) grey, and others black?, someone figured:

• Black: info you entered [for age: calculated using info you entered, Arjan]
• Grey: calculated or generated values
• Red: urls

That may be true, but is hardly obvious, I feel. It also does not explain why bold is used for some fields. And if true, then "visited" (once grey, now black) and "seen" (now red) should be grey too?

While editing one's profile, for Email one is told "never displayed, used for optional notifications and your gravatar". And for Birthday one sees "only used for displaying age". But not so much for Real Name:

So, some other possible changes:

• Please add placeholder text for Real Name too. Or even better, like suggested in the question: also somehow indicate this when viewing one's own profile, or while editing if a value has already been entered; one might not remember that placeholder text after some time:

  

• Please make all public fields (like "member for" and "seen") black and remove any bold.

• Please make all private fields (like "email", "real name", "visited", the optional "recent names", and maybe "helpful flags") grey.

• Maybe make the "visited" easter egg a bit more obvious?

• Maybe add a tooltip about the refresh rate of "Seen"?

• When adding descriptions is deemed to much, then what about a link to "View your public profile"? When looking at other people's profile, you can never be sure what they entered. And not everyone might think about logging out or using some incognito browsing mode to check.

(As an aside: earlier, even the labels had some color coding, but that was removed.)

Answer 2

While I agree in principle with you that such things should be clearly displayed, its actually easy enough to figure out. Simply look which informations are displayed publicly at the other user profiles. The "real name" isn't, just to moderators and staff. About the Autobiographer badge: the (very short) description of that badge states "Completed all user profile fields.", which apparently really means all fields.