As I realized that new people do not have the possibility to know the people who are writing since a longer time, I thought it might be interesting to add a possibility in the profile section which gives room for a self-presentation. We ask always people to present themselves, but how do they get to know us...just by the posts...maybe but sometimes a background helps to better understand the persons position.
Just an idea
Yours
Christoph

Hi Christoph

Currently you are able to link your profile to a LinkedIn profile, where someone would be able to read your publicly available information. But I suppose that is not an ideal solution.

Here are a few brainstorming / clarifying questions from my side:
1. On the current forum user profile page, if a text box was available where one could type up ones own profile description, would that be useful with respect to your idea / request?
2. When you say present yourself, would you want to attach a pdf or presentation to your profile in which you presented your work, interests and past activites?

Look forward to your feedback.
Rgds
Trevor

I agree with you Christoph.

I suggest before we start programming new things we should use the existing two simple options of displaying basic information about oneself and that is in the footer (see below) and in the short text about yourself (see on the left). In the footer you can give a link to your website, LinkedIn page or whatever.

This can be edited if you click on "Profile", which is one of the tabs at the top. Then click on that nearly invisible edit button on the right (white text on green box). Here you can edit what appears in your footer and what appears on the left of each of your posts.
How about leading by example and adding some basic information about yourself? That would be great.

If everyone took the rule seriously to introduce oneself in their first post, then one could always go back to the person's first post and check there. You can use the Search tab at the top to search for all the posts of a person.

If you have missed the intro in the first post, you could also add it at any time to a new post you are making.

Personally I really agree with you that it is so important to know who one is reading from or talking to. Learning is a social activity and we learn best from people and with people that we trust.

I tried to alter the about me part. I did not find how. I put in personal text but it did not appear.
I geve up
Yours Christoph

Hi Christoph

I am sorry to hear that it did not work for you. The Personal Text field only accepts 300 characters at the moment. I have begun a conversation with our IT company about making changes to the size of the text box of this personal text field on the profile information page.

I am sure you went to the correct place in your profile, but just in case you missed a step, I have included a few screen shots below of the respective steps that a user needs to take to change their profile and personal info.

1. Go to your profile page, easiest way is by clicking on the "Profile" tab at the top of the page, which is located between the "My topics" and "Rules" tab at the top of the page.

2. Click on the "Edit" button see the screenshot below:

3. Click on "Profile Information" see screenshot below:

4. Entry up to 300 characters into the "Personal text" text box, see screenshot below:


5. When you are done, press the "Save" button at the bottom of the screen:


Please let me know if this works for you!
Rgds
Trevor

It´s exaclty what I did. and my frase was
I´m a sanitary engineer with a sanitation company in Brazil and Peru, doing consultancy in other countries of LA.
110 caracters... so ther should not be any problem
CP

Hi Christoph

I have done a few checks in the back-end and I do not find anything that should be causing this problem. So I am not sure why it is not working for you. Did you receive an error message by any chance that could further assist my investigations?

Rgds
Trevor

Just in case others had the same problem as Christoph (above): For your short sentence about yourself which appears in italics on the left of your posts, under your photo, you cannot use special characters.

So, not: I'm a sanitary engineer..., but: I am a sanitary engineer...

I encourage all of you to edit your profile in the way described above, so that we know at least one short sentence about you. It makes it more fun to learn and discuss things together when it is not an anonymous place. Thanks.

Regards,
Elisabeth