E-mail address
Open Social has a setting that determines the visibility of a member's email address in the community.
The email address is a mandatory field that users need to fill in to create an account. This is needed so that:
- the user receives email notifications of activities on the platform.
- the organization can reach out to all users if necessary.
The email address is usually visible in every user profile but in some communities, this is not always desirable. It could be that certain community members want to keep their contact information private to avoid everyone reaching out to them.
By default, Open Social allows users to hide their email address on their profile from other users. When a user registers to a community, his/her email address is hidden by default. The user can decide to change this in the settings:
This information will only by hidden from normal users. Site managers are always able to see the email address.
When the email address is not visible on the platform, users can always send each other private messages to get in touch instead.
When you don't want users to hide their email address
If a community needs all email addresses to be visible, site managers can turn on the setting 'show email on all user profiles', which means users will no longer be able to hide their email addresses.
Work-related communities/intranets make the most use of this setting.
Read more details about how to use this setting here.
Hide other profile information
Besides the email, which is a mandatory field, the site manager can also determine wether users may hide other profile information:
- Phone number and location
- Function and organisation
- Self introduction, expertise and interests
Again, this is use full in case the organisation need to collect specific personal information about their users, but the user does not want others to see.
Instructions about this setting can be found here!