Making "Personal Information" on the Accountpage leaner.

jan2k6

Hi there I am setting up a forum for a page, which is mostly used by a group of people who don't know computers and the internet that well. That's the reason, why i chose vanilla as forum software in the first place, because the basic featureset is so lean, that my users might actually be able to learn how to use it. Up to now i use an own implementation of something that can hardly be called a forum, but that makes it even easier to use. Additionally those people (doctors) want everything to look really respectable, they don't want anything childish. Now vanilla satisfies these conditions nearly perfectly, i'm really happy about that, but one little annoying thing remains: In your Account-Settings, under "Personal Information" you can type in your First Name, Last Name, E-Mail address, account picture an icon and even custom data. I don't want anybody to be able to set an account picture an icon or additional custom data. The possibility to do this confuses my users (yes, it does!) and it makes them mistrust the webpage. My users don't like the idea, that they can have funny avatars next to their postings. Most of them won't use the feature, but i want to make sure, that no one even could use it. So, is there a way to disable those things to appear on the Account-page? I looked through some PHP code to manually disable it, but i am not really used to PHP, i was not able to find the actual code that puts those input boxes on the webpage. Actually i was wondering, why this is a core-feature anyway, in my oppinion this functionality should be an extension (or at least it should be possible to disable it easily). Any help is highly appreciated, Jan.

jimw

Would you also want to stop one user from seeing another user's profile?

Dinoboff

You can copy themes/account_identity_form.php into themes/vanilla/.
Edit themes/vanilla/account_identity_form.php and replace the part from the line 65 to 79: echo '<li> <label for="txtPicture">'.$this->Context->GetDefinition('AccountPicture').'</label> <input type="text" name="Picture" value="'.$this->User->Picture.'" maxlength="255" class="SmallInput" id="txtPicture" /> <p class="Description"> '.$this->Context->GetDefinition('AccountPictureNotes').' </p> </li> <li> <label for="txtIcon">'.$this->Context->GetDefinition('Icon').'</label> <input type="text" name="Icon" value="'.$this->User->Icon.'" maxlength="255" class="SmallInput" id="txtIcon" /> <p class="Description"> '.$this->Context->GetDefinition('IconNotes').' </p> </li> </ul>';
by echo '</ul>';

And to be sure, that no avatar or user pictures with be used you can create an extension like that:
<?php /* Extension Name: Vanilla for respectable people Extension Url: http://lussumo.com/addons/ Description: Avatars look childish, so we take them off Version: 1.0 Author: Dinoboff Author Url: http://lussumo.com/community/discussion/4085/making-personal-information-on-the-accountpage-leaner/#Item_2 */ $Context->Session->User->Icon = ''; $Context->Session->User->Picture = ''; ?>

jan2k6

jimw: Yes, as long as one is not logged in, i don't want people to look at other people profiles. I already found an extension, that prevents this. Dinoboff: Thanks for you reply, it was very very helpful. I just didn't know where to search for this functionality and now i was able to remove all that i don't want to have. I don't think i need the "respectable people extension" :-D because as long as no one is able to set any images in the first place, i can leave this functionality as is. Thanks guys, i think all my problems are solved for now :-) Jan.

Dinoboff

You just remove the form
I think that a user could set an avatar even without the form, with a link like that http://lussumo.com/community/account/?PostBackAction=ProcessIdentity&u=1&Icon=http://domain.com/avatar.gif
where u = your user id and Icon= url to the picture.
Well... I didn't think one of your doctors will try to hack his account page, but who knows, you just need one anachist in your community to mess up your forum and scare the other respectable doctors.

jan2k6

I would be happy, if just a handful of the users would understand the medium internet so well, that they could do something like that. I know this all might sound very funny to you, but for me it is a strong aching in the rectal area to work for such people. They complain about everything, that's not 100% sterile. I might be forced to remove even more stuff the next few days, only because they don't understand what its purpose is. Anyway, thank you for your help, i really appreciate it. Jan.