Turning profiles on and off

Profiles let readers be visible to each other. Useful with a community, unnecessary without one, and a privacy question in business.

Profiles let readers be visible to each other. Useful with a community, unnecessary without one, and a privacy question in business.

The setting

1. Open Knowledge from the product tray, then Settings.
2. Under User profiles, switch them on or off. Switched on, choose Public user profiles or Private user profiles.
3. Save.

What a profile shows

A name, a photo, and the reader's public contributions. On a help centre with a community that gives posts an author and makes the place feel inhabited.

Why you might leave them off

Without a community there is nothing for a profile to show, so it adds a page nobody visits.

There is also a privacy dimension. In a business context, customers' names being visible to each other reveals who your customers are, and some of them would rather that were not the case.

That one has a middle answer rather than an off switch. Private user profiles keeps the profile working for its owner and for your agents while other readers see nothing, so the customer list stays yours. Where the privacy objection is the only objection, that is the setting rather than turning profiles off.

For an internal help centre

Profiles usually make sense, since colleagues already know each other and attribution helps.

Decide with the community

These two settings belong together. Community on and profiles off produces anonymous posts, which changes the tone considerably and rarely for the better.

See also

• What the community is and whether to turn it on
• The name and basic settings of your Help Center