Member profile

Your profile is what other members see when they look you up. It is one tab of your member area at /members/myaccount; the others — Dashboard, Account, Groups, Projects, Usage and so on — are listed down the left-hand side, and which of them exist depends on which Members plugins your hub has enabled.

A profile is how work on a hub gets attributed to a person. Your name on a dataset, a wiki page, or an answer in the forum links here. It is also how people find you before they can include you: a group manager sending an invitation, or a project owner adding a collaborator, searches the member list and picks a name off it. A blank or private profile is not neutral — it makes you harder to add to things.

Your profile is not your Account tab. The profile holds what other people see; the Account tab holds how you get in — your password, the outside services linked to your account, and an SSH key if your hub offers one.

Editing your profile

The profile is a list of rows, one per field, each showing a label and its current value. Editing happens in place:

1. Open the Profile tab of your member area.
2. Select Edit at the right of the row you want to change. The row opens to reveal the field's inputs and, beside them, a Privacy menu.
3. Change the value.
4. Select Save. Cancel closes the row and discards the change.

Errors come back into the same row: a missing required value or a rejected one is reported above the inputs.

Which rows exist is up to your hub. Name, username and email are always there; everything else — organisation, telephone, address, biography, interests, ORCID, web site — comes from the profile form the hub's administrators built.

Two rows behave differently:

• A field an administrator has marked read-only shows a notice instead of inputs: The "…" profile field has been marked as read-only by a HUB administrator. Ask support if it is wrong.
• Passwords are not edited here. Use the Account tab, which also lists the external services linked to your account and lets you set a local password and manage an SSH public key.

Above the rows is a Profile Completeness meter. On hubs that run incremental registration, filling in fields can earn points.

Privacy

Privacy is the decision most people get wrong here, so it is worth being deliberate about. Two settings are in play, and the outer one wins.

The whole profile. At the top of the Profile tab is a toggle reading Public Profile :: Click here to set your profile private. or Private Profile :: Click here to set your profile public. Selecting it flips the state immediately. A private profile cannot be opened by other members at all.

Individual fields. While the profile is public, each field's Privacy menu offers three settings:

Setting	Who can see the value
Public (anyone can see)	Everyone, including visitors who are not logged in.
Registered users (only logged in members can see)	Anyone logged in to the hub.
Private (only you can see)	Only you.

While the profile as a whole is private, those menus are replaced by the message Account must be public to set access on individual profile fields. Set the profile public first if you want per-field control.

That is the part worth thinking through. There is no way to be findable and selective at the same time while the profile is private: the choice is all or nothing until you make the profile public, and only then can you hide the individual fields you would rather not publish. The useful middle setting for most members is a public profile with the name, organisation and interests left public — enough for a group manager to identify you — and the telephone number and address set to Private (only you can see). Setting the email row to Registered users is a common compromise: colleagues who are logged in can reach you, and the open web cannot.

The state a new account starts in comes from the hub's Default Privacy setting, not from a fixed default in the software, so it differs between hubs. Some hubs create every account private. Check the toggle after you register rather than assuming you are visible.

Your profile picture

The picture is small but it does real work: it is what appears beside your posts in a group forum and next to your name in a member list, and it is the fastest way for someone who met you at a meeting to be sure they have the right person.

New accounts get a default silhouette. To replace it:

1. Open the Profile tab. The picture control only appears there, even though the picture itself is shown on every tab.
2. Move the pointer over your picture and select the Change Picture band that appears over it. A pop-up opens with the current picture on the left and an upload area on the right.
3. Select Upload an Image, or drag a file onto the area. The file uploads as soon as it is chosen — there is no separate save step. When it finishes, the preview and every copy of your picture on the page are replaced and the pop-up closes.
4. To go back to the silhouette, select [Remove Picture]. The link only appears when you have a picture of your own.