Lack of interest Link to profiles exist even if "View member profiles" is disabled in permissions

[mejicat]

Not really sure this is a bug, but - at least for me - it's unintended behavior.

My forum is setup so that the members list and members profile are viewable only to registered users. This means that search indexes cannot see profiles (and, just to be sure, I include /members/ in my robots.txt). However, this means that my forum's pages are littered with hundreds of links to profiles which Google and others can't see anyway, including the various schema.org properties that are generated in the threads' HTML. Moreover, since tooltips are enabled anyway, *some* data about the users (age, location, etc) can actually be viewed by anyone regardless of permission settings, which might be problematic.

A more sensible approach, I think, would be to globally disable links to user profiles (and, thus, tooltips) when "View member profiles" is explicitly disabled as a permission. IPB does exactly that and I think it helps, SEO-wise.

I tried to see if it was possible to globally disable these links from the templates, but it appears that the link to profiles is generated by XF/Template/Templater/fnUsernameLink, which is hardcoded to always provide a link (I think?). So it probably would have to be included as an option...?

 

[mejicat]

Any comment on this?

 

[Chris D]

If we changed anything here it would have to be a fairly big change to do it properly. I don't think providing an option would be suitable, I think we'd need to actually do permission checks within the templater function. The problem with that is that we don't actually require the user details to be passed in as an entity which is the object which performs the permission checks. With that in mind, changes right now wouldn't actually affect all username links consistently.

We'll move this to Suggestions for consideration for the future.

 

[mejicat]

Thanks for your answer. Yes, it's not a small change, but I think it's worth it not to accidentally leak user data in "semi-public" communities like mine. Glad you're considering it for the future.

Thanks again and keep up the good work!