One of the Discourse founders, Jeff Atwood, explains his reasoning here:
Thereâs far too much talking already. We badly need to incentivize listening. And online, listening = reading.
While I do understand the points that Jeff Atwood makes, I donât think these are relevant for this particular application of the forum.
I believe conversation on this forum will be more technical than on general purpose forums, thus it automatically discourages posting in and of itself without a valid reason.
People who post useless stuff can be penalized by the community by flagging their posts.
While I do believe that reading this forum is a good thing for someone who is going to be a moderator or something like that, I do not believe that is the most important thing or what should be incentivized.
What should be incentivized is constructive discussion and criticism together with a good knowledge of the topic theyâre talking about.
Reading the forum is probably a prerequisite to do this, since you need to know the current state in order to improve on it but reading the forum is not the objective.
Normal users should also be rewarded for providing useful insights, tracking their time doesnât really provide any reward for that.
Since moderators are elected by the community according to how they behave and what they write, I feel that tracking time for that is quite useless.
I can understand tracking time for the first trust levels, since you want people to understand how the forum works before granting them more powers; but I feel that the time tracking becomes useless beyond that point.
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If we really did want to incentivise listening, weâd use the edits that someone has made at OpenStreetMap as part of the equation - and particularly look at how many times someone has replied to comments left on their changesets and modified their behaviour as a result**.
** Thatâs the tricky bit of course: if someone just replies to a changeset discussion comment with âyouâre wrongâ and doesnât really engage with it theyâre not really listening either - and of course exactly the same can happen in forums too.
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Although this issue has been set to âsolvedâ the user stats are still visible to anyone, if logged in or not whereas the preference setting (hide the public profile) appears to be working.
At least I cannot open any profile data by clicking on the avatar of a user who set the preferences on âhideâ. Is this a safe setting or is there any workaround? Or in other words: who besides the user himself can get access to these data?
Iâm going to circle back this with the @forums-governance for discussion and come back with a decision.
Thanks everyone.
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After discussion with the @forums-governance and in line with OSM policy about usersâ data, not showing it unless you are logged in, now user profiles in this forum require you to log-in, same goes for the User Directory.
Users can hide their profile to everyone going your top right avatar â 
â Preferences â Interface (on the left column) and enable Hide my public profile and presence features
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Thanks mate, another problem solved ⊠
⊠nevertheless I am still interested who has the privilege to access user profil data even when the profile is hidden to the public. Admin? Mods? Anyone else? Would be grateful for this information.
OK, thanks for the information.