Frequently Asked Questions
Settings
What do these "Privacy Settings" mean?
The visibility dopdown is a setting for who can view your profile, either everybody, only friends, only logged in users, or nobody. The next dropdown is if your foaf file is generated and exported. We recommend setting these settings to everybody and exported, because all the export settings can also be set on a field-basis.
What is the difference between "Visibility" and "Data Export"?
Visibility is concerned with the visual representation to the browser and Data Export is how the field is exported in the machine readable data formats (FOAF, hCard, vCard, API, etc). There is no user-level granularity for data export, the information will be exported to everybody! Data you don't want everybody to see, should be set to "don't export". The OAuth API respects user-level visibility.
What are the possible "Visibility" settings?
For profile fields, there are three different possible visibility settings: everybody, logged in users, friends and nobody. This describes who can view these fields in your profile.
What are the possible "Data Export" settings?
There are three different possible data export settings: don't export, searchable only and export. This describes how the data is exported into machine readable formats. For don't export, the field will not be exported into any of our machine readable formats, and will not be searchable through the "Search" tab. Setting the dropdown to export will enable both searching for this field aswell as export to machine readable data formats, which will not be exported if searchable only is selected.
Where is my email address used if I add and verify it?
First of all, it can be used to recover your password. Secondly, if you set the Data Export dropdown to export sha1, your email address will be added to your FOAF file in a encoded fashion such that your real email address cannot be read from it, but given your email address your sha1 value can be computed and therefore your FOAF file be identified as being yours. There are currently 6 different visibility settings which specify how your email address is presented on the profile page.
· none: your email address will not be visible (this is equivalent to setting the to-dropdown to nobody)
· contact form: visitors will be able to contact you by contact form
· sha1: the sha1 of your email will be visible
· javascript: the email address is request through an encrypted AJAX call and decrypted on your browser, then displayed in cleartext
· image: your email address is displayed as an image
· cleartext: your email address is displayed in cleartext (not recommended)
How can I reorder my profile fields?
If you have JavaScript enabled, you can reorder the fields by dragging and dropping the rows in the table. Don't forget to press save after reordering!
How do I set the type for the telephone number?
You can set the type by prefixing the vCard type information to your number. An example would be "VOICE;+1-555-555-5555" or "WORK,CELL;+1-555-555-5555" for multiple types. Valid vCard types are: voice, home, msg, work, pref, fax, cell, video, pager, bbs, modem, car, isdn, pcs. Please refer to RFC2426 for more information.
How do labels work?
Labels are a way to disclose information to a select group of users. Every resource (profile field, email, openid, connection, avatars, etc.) can be associated to labels, by selecting the visibility setting friend. Labels are simple case-sensitive words. Multiple labels may be separated by a comma. Label names will never be displayed to other users, they are only for granular visibility settings. The edit/labels page may be used to associate your friends with labels, granting them access to the protected resources.
For example if you mark your telephone number with the labels "coorporate, goodfriends" and you have three friends, Alice, Bob, and John. You have marked Alice with no labels, Bob with "goodfriends, xyz" and John with "coorporate", only John and Bob will be able to view your telephone number. If a resource is set to friend visibility with no labels, it will be visible to all your friends, no matter what labels they are associated to.
My OpenID delegation is outdated, how do I recreate it?
It is created whenever there is a change of the OpenID delegation. If you set the drop-down to no delegation, then save, then reset the dropdown to your OpenID, the delegation code will be recreated again.
