Why do some DU'ers 'disable' their profiles? I don't get it.

[emulatorloo]

I only recently become aware that some DU'er 'disable' their profile. What is the point of that?

It is not as if there is a ton of personal info in profiles that you would need to guard on the internet from search engines -- no credit card numbers, social security numbers, email addresses or anything like .

So what is the advantage to doing so?

[saltpoint]

1. Sometimes I'll disable my profile

just to watch it die.

"This one's for you, Johnny."

[RUMMYisFROSTED]

2. To kill their "member since" date. nt

[tekisui]

4. That is the reason. Any other info can be left out

on the profile. It only serves to hide the member since date.

[emulatorloo]

5. Interesting! Why would someone want to do that?

[RUMMYisFROSTED]

6. Noobs are rightly/wrongly looked upon with a modicum of suspicion. nt

[tekisui]

8. Especially those that have 1000+ posts in the matter of a week or two.

[Echo In Light]

66. Ha ... bingo

[emulatorloo]

9. Got it, But seems like "low post count" + "disabled profile" would be MORE SUSPICIOUS than date

I guess you could rack up a decent post count in a short time though.

[Posteritatis]

18. The general assumption here is "under 1000 posts = rovian spy" for a lot of people

Disabling profiles won't exactly do more damage to their reputations in that regard, since most new people are automatically seen as the enemy anyway.

If someone's already decided that somebody else is Clearly The Enemy, they'll find ways to claim it's so. Low post count, disabled profile, joined on the wrong date, joined 'correctly' long ago but have 'too few' posts for that time...

[QC]

19. Some new trolls rack up hundreds or thousands of posts in a matter of days.

They hang out in the Lounge and post lots of "LOL!" and "What a cute kittie!!!" posts to drive up their counts so that when their true selves emerge, fewer people will mark them as trolls right away.

[Occulus]

22. That's why I think Lounge posts shouldn't count toward the overall post count.

We should have loooong since taken care of that vulnerability.

[QC]

24. Very true. n/t

[RUMMYisFROSTED]

27. An ironic response.

Lol.

Slightly OT but what a cute peace sign!

[QC]

29. Don't you have any cute photos of kittens for me to coo over?

Or maybe some heaving loins poetry?

LOL!

[RUMMYisFROSTED]

31. Here goes, the ultimate Freeper test:

[QC]

33. How dare you make fun of that lovely creature?!

Your lookist agenda is perfectly clear.

(I bet you eat at Olive Garden!)

[Generic Other]

42. The Bush years were bad to you I see...

Oh my gosh. If that is the result of breeding, then I am not sure I like it.

[emulatorloo]

47. We are a big cat tent here.

[Vincardog]

54. Now THAT is a cute kitten

[RUMMYisFROSTED]

56. Well played.

[Turbineguy]

30. I'll show you!

I'm going to the Lounge! Right Fucking Now.

[Turbineguy]

32. OK, I'm back

Ask me anything.

[Bobbie Jo]

64. +1

[Iggo]

67. And what about Musicians?

Or Entertainment? Or Cooking? Or GLBT? Or State Forums? Books? Or Science Fiction? Or Addiction & Recovery? Why just The Lounge?

[Shell Beau]

69. I totally disagree. That is basically saying the lounge doesn't count.

Most of my posts have come from the lounge. And while many wouldn't have counted as anything useful, there were many of times that I posted some worthwhile stuff.

[Iggo]

65. Both rightly and wrongly. (n/t)

[uppityperson]

37. Here is how to get around that...

hover your mouse over one of the icons, profile, send pm, etc and you will see the address of that page, last bit is ID number. Or click on one of the icons and look at the web address.

Once you get the number, you can compare with others to get the join date down pretty close. I did this a couple nights ago for a returnee that thought was posting before DU began. Came up with date in 2003.

[Brother Buzz]

45. Yet the browser progress bar defeats that silly trick

DU member ID numbers give a good idea when someone joined. Just point to the mail box envelope or the '+' or '-' head and note the number on the progress bar at the bottom of the page.

I'm ll3392 (drop the first 1) so I'm 13382nd member, I joined in 2002. You number is 122086 (drop the first 1) and you are the 22086th member. A little sampling of members numbers will give you a good idea when someone joined.

[asdjrocky]

3. Because they're after me.

They're all after me.

[mmonk]

7. Originally because of harassment.

[emulatorloo]

10. that makes sense

[mmonk]

20. I no longer care and have accepted it.

But it started by internet stalking to a culmination of inquiring and hostile phone calls. It spooked my family.

[Hekate]

34. Ew, that's really, really scary.

:scared:

Hekate

[mmonk]

43. I decided to no longer be afraid.

What I didn't know was that my entire entries in Newspapers went online as well (31 so far). So if people want to take the time, they will track you down. They just have to gather up all the information. But yes, it can be unnerving.

[AllentownJake]

11. There is a hostile website that tracks our movements

our user names, our postings, etc.

I can understand why some people would disable their profiles for that reason alone.

[graywarrior]

12. I disabled mine a while ago because I was being discussed over at

the Forum Whose Name We Cannot Speak

[onehandle]

16. NAMBLA?

Yeah, that would bug me too.

:+

[graywarrior]

21. Sorta

[Commie Pinko Dirtbag]

68. Eviler than that. -nt

[emulatorloo]

17. EEK.

[napi21]

13. I didn't but I can tell you why I thought about it.

About 2 years ago my husband came home from work & told me about a memo he was asked to read at work. It had to do with forbidding any talk or action of possible union organizing. I was soo pissed off, and I posted about it here & named the company. I never said where or what store, but it enraged several other people who shop there and they contacted the company. The post nearly got my husband fired! We got several calls from 2 VP's from the home office. The only way the co. could have tracked him down was because my town is in my profile and it's a small enough town that there can't be more than 1-2 employees from here.

I really did consider disabling my profile, but then decided I would just be more careful what I posted. BTW, hubby's retired now.

[QC]

14. It's unfair, but I generally assume that hidden profile = sock puppet.

That's often the case, but not always, of course.

[Xithras]

15. Some people prefer anonymity.

I had mine disabled for the first couple of years I posted here. Not for any reason specific to DU, but simply because I didn't like the idea of potentially having ANY personal information about me available anywhere on the Internet.

After a couple of years, I realized that I'd already revealed so much about myself in various discussions that "anonymity" was moot anyway. A curious person could learn a lot more about me using the search feature than they'd ever learn from my profile.

[mmonk]

26. If someone wants to find you, they eventually will.

[UndertheOcean]

23. Why do you care , I don't get it .

[emulatorloo]

46. Don't care, just curious. I came across it the other day with a newbie and it seemed "WEIRD"

that's all. I just didn't understand the reasoning behind it.

[MineralMan]

25. That's a good question, and there are many reasons, I think.

1. The person is new and doesn't want you to know that.
2. The person is attempting to be as anonymous as possible, although that can still be done with a visible profile, since you don't have to reveal location, gender, etc.
3. The person doesn't want you to see his/her actual post count, for whatever reason.
4. The person never enables any profile on any site, for whatever reason.
5. The person has no idea why, but disables the profile anyhow.

Funnier to me are the profiles where the user hides gender or attempts humor with place or something else. When that happens, I have to use him/her, she/he, etc. in replies to posts, to avoid getting chewed out for making a gender assumption. That's a PITA. What's even funnier is when the person hiding his/her gender is the one complaining if I happen to get it wrong somehow.

Personally, I consider a hidden profile as a negative when thinking about a post the person has made. It's just how I am. I also display my profile, and include a link to my website, where anyone can learn my name, see a photo of me, and, with a little effort, find out my contact information. Doing that keeps me a little on my toes, although not a lot.

[NJmaverick]

28. They have something to hide

[La Lioness Priyanka]

35. because they can and its none of your business.

[PeaceNikki]

36. .

Get outta my head!!

:loveya:

[emulatorloo]

48. LOL n/t

[uppityperson]

38. I wonder why any of us think anything on profiles, except join date, is real

I tell people with hidden profiles to just lie if they don't want "real" info out there.

[emulatorloo]

49. That's why I didn't "get it". You can make up anything to put in your profile.

[Blue-Jay]

39. I really don't click on anyone's profile.

Mostly because I don't give a shit about where people live or their gender or what their favorite fucking color is.

But that's just me.

(Note to OP: I didn't click on your profile either. I doubt that it's enlightening.)

[Lucian]

40. I don't understand why this has ever been an issue.

Some people want their privacy.

[snagglepuss]

41. A pointless concern because you are assuming that people who post

a profile are being honest.

[emulatorloo]

50. that was why I found it strange to "disable' a profile. You can put anything you want in a

profile, say that you are the Queen Of England if you want to.

[bananas]

51. I do it to weed out the idiots.

Since a troll can put anything they want in their profile, I can tell if someone is an idiot when they start asking why I disabled my profile.

[Bobbie Jo]

52. Yes, anything BUT the registration date and # of posts. nt

[Cleita]

44. Two things.

Trolls don't offer information. I've noticed this on other websites as well even conservative one. We do have some celebrity posters, so they probably disable their profiles as well so it's not as easy to figure out whom they are although there are others that use their real names and we know who they are.

[A-Schwarzenegger]

53. IF you have a decent IGNORE list & are MILDLY obsessive, you can find the rough join date

of a hidden-profile poster by putting them on ignore,
then they pop up in between two others on your Ignore list
& you have the rough join date. Not that I have a decent Ignore list
or am mildly obsessive, of course. :*

[snagglepuss]

55. IMO this puts you in league with

Sherlock. My hat off to you. Very impressed:)

[A-Schwarzenegger]

61. It is my contribution to humankind.

:hi:

[snagglepuss]

62. I just took this opportunity to eyeball your blog. Your observations are great.

I'll go back to peruse when its not so late. Absolutely love the remark that people in Quiet City make hippies look ambitious and aggressive. LOL. This sounds like a film I gotta see. If you like satirical films about alienated people you might enjoy a
non-mainstream Austrian film that came out several years ago called Dog Days. :hi:

edit name of movie

[A-Schwarzenegger]

71. Thanks, snaggle. I'll keep an eye out for Dog Days.

:)

[apocalypsehow]

57. A very low post count + a disabled profile almost always = PUMA. Or FREEPII. n/t.

[HipChick]

58. There are sites that keep track of DUers..

R/W conservative-sites-that-cannot-be-named..keep track of DU'ers...name changes..what's going on in that person's life..etc..

[gleaner]

59. Some people do it ,,,,

because they want to give out the least amount of personal data. This is not necessarily out of a bad motive, sometimes it is just innate caution.

When I was posting on a different forum one of the other posters began "following" me around the board asking me questions of a very personal nature that even your friends don't ask. I couldn't shake him. When I posted on other boards, there he was too. I googled his name which is what he used as his internet identity, and found out that he was a stalker and had been barred from a lot of forums for harassing women. No one knew if he was dangerous or if he would take it beyond following you when you were online to trying to find you offline.

It seems what had triggered his interest in me, is that I had inadvertently chosen the name of his latest TV infatuation as my posting name. So in his mind, I had become his current great love and was therefore going to pay attention to him. I immediately stopped using that name, but it didn't help much. I left his favorite place and began posting other places. He followed me for a little while but my husband went after him, and finally he got a new flavor of the month and left me alone. Also, the owner of the forum I had left threatened to bar him because he had antagonized so many female posters. Some people think the less information given the better. On the internet you never know who you are talking to.

[TexasObserver]

60. I don't place much confidence in the postings of those who do.

I figure "we'll see."

[Cessna Invesco Palin]

63. Ask the people who got fired from their jobs...

...because some stupid ass Freeper with nothing better to do took it upon themselves to deduce a person's actual identity from information in their profile and then informed their employer of all of their "dubious" internet postings. (Yes, this has actually happened before.)

[whatchamacallit]

70. I can't figure out how to tell what the status of mine is. Would someone check and let me know?

Edit: Never mind, found it under preferences. It is enabled, but pretty much devoid of details.