@stefan and I had a good chat yesterday about "the current profile".

Here are a mixture of our thoughts then and some thoughts now. 

Since eviscape started its been a major talking point! The very first version of eviscape (with QT client by@tobias ) had the concept of a current node (profile) i.e. you chose which of your nodes you were operating on behalf of when you followed, posted etc. The first version of the web front end (please don't kill me@iapain !) did not have have the concept of a current node so if you wanted to follow someone, you clicked the follow button and another page / popup appeared where you chose "who" to follow with. Back then (4 years or so ago) the concept of "follow" was new / unheard of, so making people go through an extra step seemed too much. So we added the current node concept to the web interface. The recent (mainly performance) refactoring by@johannes also ended up tweaking how the current node worked. However the issue is still not solved.

A related issue is "your identity" when you post on a group. i.e. originally, we had the concept of a "pen name" which was either your full name, login name or nothing if you wanted to hide those. Then we changed it so that it would be your full name or "primary profile" (the first profile you get when you sign up). But that didn't solve the@jtdreamworld request of proper multiple identities i.e. you want to post as x on group A and y on group B. So in the recent version of eviscape we record the Profile and the Author Profile (which is taken from the current profile). But this is not really nice because you still have to think "is my current profile correct before i post on group C?"

(btw, we also added some permissions checking so that only certain members of a group can use the author name of that group to write on another group.- but that had the unwelcome side effect of not being able to switch to all your profiles with the drop down).

So yesterday we talked about several steps to hopefully help all this:

1) When a member joins a group, by default when they post, their primary profile will be their identity in a group. e.g. if I post on group A, the credit will be: "simonredfern for Group A" or some similar wording.

2) However, a member can change the profile that represents them on a group. So I could change my settings for a profile so that when I post on Group B the credit would be "electromusician for Group B".

Thus when I navigate to Group A and post, I would automatically post as a different identity to when I post on Group B.

3) When you post on a group it will show your identity profle (and you'll be able to change it and that will change your setting for that profile)

But what about following etc? Well, we figured that:

4) When you click the follow button, a small pop up will appear showing a "my profiles list" in order of:

• Primary Profile
• Current profile (this will really be the "last used profile")
• All other profiles in order (not separated by groups / not groups but maybe with some icon (but not colour))

This way it will be easy to follow using your primary profile or your last used (current) profile or any other profile.

5) The above "my profiles list", will appear simlarly for the control panel (see point 7,8) and other places we need that list.

6) Since we don't need the current profile so obviously any more, we can remove the top bar showing the current profile!

7) We could move the profile drop down link (removed in point 6) to a "my account drop down" OR just use the control panel for navigation to profiles.

8) The control panel (if we still need it in the next design) could be improved and have less options i.e. only the profile names. All other navigation options would happen when you navigate to the profile. In practice i prefer using the control panel rather than a drop down, because its "always there". To consider with@casianus

We still need to consider how to present posts on non groups. e.g. should it be "simonredfern for MyOtherProfile"?

(stefan please add anything I left out sofar / correct).

:-)