Let's improve on the user profile

[hot_pastrami]

Originally Posted by lumberjim

i bet if you put your mind ( and maybe hot_pastrami's) to it, you could come up with random quizzes for every newbie. we could all contribute several questions we'd like to know about the new and untested.

These days, most of the things I put my mind to recoil in shock and disgust. Spongy!

The key is to ask about things that are interesting, amusing, or useful. One field that would occasionally be useful is a gender field... some users' handles don't give a clue which pronoun to apply. Of course each user has the option to leave this field blank if he/she doesn't wish for his/her gender to be used for slash-paired pronoun reduction.

Happy Monkey's idea to use multiple homepages is a good idea, though "homepage" may not be the best term there. For instance, I'd add a link to my Flickr profile, and maybe my resumé... neither of which is really a "homepage." Maybe just "Personal URLs" or something equally goofy and ambiguous.

One possibility to add some value to the community, assuming these fields are included in a search somewhere, would be a field to indicate things that one has expertise in. So I could search all users for "psychology," and learn that Wolf is a good person to ask whether I am truly disturbed, or just faking it to get attention. The "interests" field sort of covers this, but not exactly.

That's all I can think of right now.