Announcement Changes to member Profiles

[Greg Bernhardt]

Two changes have been made. One for better clarity and one for spam prevention.

Clarity change:
We have split the education profile field into two fields. One for expressing the level at which you are working towards and one for which level you have officially obtained. This should reduce confusion for example figuring out if someone has or is working towards their PhD. In addition we have added a "University" field where you can include where you currently attend or alma mater. Further more in the "member card" (popup), under the user name and gender there will be a line where it will list the highest obtained and the degree.

Spam Prevention:
Recently spammers have been registering and typing in their spam URLs into profile fields. Specially "homepage" and "about" were being targeted. Note that there is very little benefit as both fields are set to "nofollow" and member pages in general are set to "noindex" so search engines don't value these links or pages. However some spammers don't get this and still waste our resources and presentation. So we have restricted usage of these fields to staff, advisors, and gold members.

Click here to visit your profile and make the changes
https://www.physicsforums.com/account/personal-details

 

[Evo]

Are the spam changes retroactive? I've seen so many new "members" lately, like one the other day that posted a link to his site where he was advertising that he writes research papers for a fee. I'm sure this person isn't here to contribute. He posted the link in the "information" page.

 

[Greg Bernhardt]

Are the spam changes retroactive?

Yeah, it's a simple template conditional

 

[symbolipoint]

,... under the user name and gender there will be a line where it will list the highest obtained and the degree...

Let's hope not; at least for most people, whom one would assume have already reached their highest level of gender.

 

[haushofer]

Yes, male supremacy! And that in an age of political correctness :P

The educatn adjustment seems good to me. I've also found it rather vague.

 

[vanhees71]

Well, physics is gender neutral. So it doesn't matter whether you are male, female or whatever you define to be ;-)).

 

[nearc]

there needs to be a "i wish i was still in school" option