What is Fluther?
Fluther is a free Q&A collective that specializes in getting
fast answers from the right people. Check it out!
New, improved profiles
Friday night we’ll be taking Fluther down for a few hours to deploy some updates to the site. What’s new?
- Redesigned profiles
- Topics
- Privacy
Let’s break each one down in a bit more detail.
Redesigned profiles
Profile pages are much more attractive. Instead of showing every possible thing about you on one page, there’s an overview that highlights the greatest things about you. The bio section has been reborn as “your story”. The greatest questions you’ve asked and the greatest answers you’ve written are automatically shown (skip down to the privacy section for more on managing these). Topics are now styled in the new way instead of just being a text link.
Topics
Mousing over a topic anywhere on Fluther will now show a “hovercard”: a snippet that lets you know how many questions there are on that topic, how many people have it publicly on their profile and gives you the option to add it to (or remove it from) your profile. Adding and removing topics is quick and easy and won’t refresh the page. We’ve added descriptions to the topics, so if you see an acronym that you don’t understand (say, DSLR), you can hover over the topic to get more information. If you see a topic that could use a description, please flag it to let us know.
Privacy
Protecting your privacy is something very important to Fluther. You should be in control of your content. We’ve made two changes that give you control over topics, questions and answers on your profile.
You can add topics discreetly (discretely too if you wish). If you are into seahorse porn or have a sensitive disease and want to see those questions but don’t want to tell the world, just add it your profile, go to that topic page and uncheck the “Show this topic on my profile” box.
You can also control which questions and answers are shown on your profile on a one-by-one basis. If you see a question or answer anywhere on your profile, you can click “Hide on Profile”. If you want to undo that just click “Show on Profile” (if you hide a question or answer from the overview you’ll have to go find it on the questions/answers tab).
Other changes
Since the beginning of time (or at least the beginning of Fluther) comments have been referred to as messages or PMs. We’re changing the name of comments to messages across the site to make it clearer for everyone.
“Your Fluther” is being renamed to “people you are following”. “Your Fluther” confused many people, so now instead of “adding someone to your fluther,” you can just “follow” that person. This should avoid a lot of confusion.
We will be merging the expertise, hobbies & interest and places fields into a single topics field. If you want to see your old data for those fields, go to My Account and click the “View retired profile fields” link. Topics are being cleaned up to focus on actual fields of knowledge so if you wrote a mini-bio in those sections you may want to go to that page and copy and paste some of that text into your story.
Finally–in other news–we just crossed a big milestone in traffic: more than a million people visit Fluther every month. We’re honored and humbled to have helped so many of you.
Can’t wait to see it all in action!