Profile

A profile is one person read two ways. Your own carries the address and the settings behind it; anybody else’s carries only what is public. The screen is the same screen: it reads your own when it is opened without a username, and a stranger’s when the username in the address is somebody else’s.

What a public profile shows. The username, the display name, the about text, the language, the picture, and the published works, achievements and guild. Each work carries its rating, its tags, its kudos and what the record verified of how it was written.

What a public profile never shows. The email address, the account identifier and either age attestation. The address is the whole of what the server knows about who somebody is, the identifier is how its database addresses them, and what a person swore about their own age is between them and the service.

An account with no username is not reachable here at all. Public routes address people by username, so a person who has chosen none has no public page. A username nobody holds and a username that is not one read the same: no profile holds that name.

Edit profile is the owner’s own view. Username, display name, about, language and the switch that publishes your writing statistics, written in one save. The username field keeps the same rule as Account details: three to thirty-two characters, lowercase letters, digits and single hyphens, capitals folded as you type. A refusal stands beside the field it is about: a name somebody else holds, or a name that is not a shape a name can have.

The statistics switch decides what the figures on this page are worth to anybody else. With it off, the achievements and the figures read from your writing stay yours, and a screen that would publish them says so beside the control.

Somebody else’s profile carries an overflow menu instead of the edit. Report is in it, which opens the report form with this person as the subject.

Try: open your own profile, press Edit profile, type a username somebody else holds and save. The line beside the field says the name is held, and nothing on the page changes until a free name is saved.