On Sun, 27 Jul 2003, Jon Lebkowsky wrote:
> Very cool, Josh. Suggest you look at The ryze.com as well as Friendster to
> get a sense how things might work. Also check out that Ryze user agreement
> and perhaps others - we need to have a user agreement in place for Deanster
> and other interactive environments (I have a good model that's simpler than
> Ryze's that we cd use).
>
> Re. identity, exposure shd be in the hands of the participant, who shd have
> an easy way to select what details others can see, or (as at Ryze) to expose
> details to selected other members.
I agree. Giving members privacy control over their profile information
encourages them to share more information and add more value to the
database. (It's also respectful and polite.)
I've been working on an enhanced profile module -- please use it or build
off of it if it can help you. Currently, it has the following features
in addition to the standard profile module:
- Adminstrator-configurable and user-configurable privacy settings.
- Multiple fields can be grouped together under one privacy setting.
- Multiple fields can be displayed together on one row.
- Automatic lookup from zip code to city and state.
- Fields can be auto-filled based on an incoming URL.
- Users can choose to reveal e-mail addresses if they want.
The privacy groups and row layout for the fields is configured by
editing arrays in the module itself. The privacy settings are available
from the module settings page.
Each group of fields can be set by the administrator to one of:
non-public - user has no option to make the field public
optional - user can optionally make the field public, default private
optional-public - user has option to make public, default public
public - always visible to all registered users
There's currently no option for making profile information visible
to anonymous visitors.
There are a few places where you can get free zipcode databases --
i've been testing with one from http://cfdynamics.com/zipbase/.
The zip code lookup will work if you just load that into a table
named "zipcodes" with the obvious column names (zip, city, state).
I'll post a link to this module on the TalentDatabase page. Please
let me know what you think of it.
-- ?!ng
