Making Use of Custom Profile Fields

[ishy]

Mostly I'm just curious how everyone uses the custom profile fields, and have you made the topic view or profile view decorative at all? What fields have gotten a good response from members? Have you done anything custom with the profile fields that has worked to good success, and can you explain how?

[Looking]

It depends on what your forum is about. For instance if you r community is about comics then a custom field might show what type of comic the member likes.

[ishy]

I realize many will be pertinent to the theme of the forum. I still want to know specifically what people have done. The question was not "What can you do?", but "What did you do?".

[Looking]

I use it sometimes to show certain items to members. For instance if custom field is 'x' then give them these options or restrict them in some way.

[ishy]

So, sort of like secret messages from admin to a member? That's a use I hadn't considered.

[Roph]

I'd say I've gone pretty far with SMF's fields. One of the sites I run is based around an MMORPG, and I let users store the info about their character as field entries.



The great thing about them is that they're also easy to grab through SSI for external use, so I can make pages about their characters (let them have a large text field to have their own page content), or even take the info about their character and generate a signature image with that info for them

[ishy]

That's gorgeous!