Last week we started alpha testing a new social feature for the site, public user profiles, which could be accessed through the forum. They display your country, when you joined Skritter, the posts you made on the forum, and some progress stats. Generally people liked them, aside from one concern: that some may not want to have this or other account information available to other Skritterers. Similar concerns were raised when we tried out the practice ticker on the home page in February.
So due to popular demand we’re adding a new privacy preference which can be found in the general settings page in the account tab. This is a catch all setting that forbids letting users see any of your account’s details in your public profile or anywhere else. And this will cover features that we build in the future as well, such as leaderboards or anything else that comes up that we haven’t even thought up yet. That way you only have to set it once and never have to worry about it again.
By default your account is public, but we’ve added the setting to the welcome page so that new users can make the decision upon arrival. And for the next two weeks, we have disabled profiles for everyone to give you guys some time to decide if you want to keep your account information completely private. After the two weeks we will formally introduce profiles for everybody. So until then, set your privacy preference, and fill in your “About Me” information too if you like!