Hi: I am new to this website and to forums! If I am doing this all wrong please let me know. I was just wondering why I can't view public profiles. Someone answered a post and I was just wondering where he was located, but I got a message saying I didn't have permission to access the page.
I believe you have to be logged-in to be able to look at a member's profile. A member's location, if it was provided, is displayed at the upper-right corner of the post under the member's join date.
I had access to member profile pages set to require you to have 5 posts + be a member of the forums for 5 days: see this thread. However, I suppose that there isn't any real danger in making it available to people who have just registered, so I'll do that.
Thanks for the info. I knew that I had to be logged on, but I wondered if maybe I had to be on for awhile or have so many posts, but I couldn't find any reference to that, but maybe I missed it.
The posting persons location is in the top right corner of the posting. You don't even need to access a profile for that info.
Thanks for the info and you are right it is right there in the corner....and I didn't even notice it! A lot to learn....!
tlfouhar, How's the gardening in Maine these days? I'm at completely the opposite side of the continent. About as far west as you can go ... aside from Hawaii.
That location field can be very helpful in answering people's questions or making suggestions that fit a forum members gardening environment. So, those who did not fill it in or who put a generic location (USA covers a tremendous range of climate and soil conditions for example), may want to go in and update that field in their profile to something that accurately indicates where they are gardening.
Hi LPN: The gardening season hasn't started yet, but it definitely should be early this year because we had a very early spring with very little snow cover all winter. It was an incredibly warm winter. I have found a few mushrooms already and I hope this will be a really good year for them! I lived in Seattle, Washington many years ago. It was beautiful out there, but I have not been back since I move back home to Maine.
It would be better to have separate fields for city, state/prov, and country with the latter two being mandatory. Concatenate them to determine the location for display purposes. Otherwise, add to the profile page, next to the location field, a suggested entry format along with an example. This way the displayed location will have a consistent format.
I'm not too worried about consistency, personally re: locations. Is it that much of a hassle that a programmatic solution needs to be made? When people register, they are asked to fill in: "City or Region plus Country, please" People who registered a long time ago weren't forced to fill in a location - and I did have a plugin that forced people to fill it in or else they couldn't access any pages. Unfortunately, it didn't quite work and I had a few complaints, so I removed it.