Currently user profiles are never visible to visitors. The "public" setting means "visible to registered users". "Public" used to mean "everyone including visitors", but JT considered it a bug and it was changed (bug 10907).

But sometimes we want the profile to be visible to visitors, for example on community site where a limited part of the profile is visible to everyone (like LinkedIn or Facebook). Or if a company wants it's employees to register themselves on the site, so their information is available to (potential) clients.

There have been requests for this before and it has never been implemented, because it was deemed a security risk. But I think that that needn't be the case, if we put some thought into the implementation.

Currently there are two ways of setting the privacy:
- by setting the "publicProfile" field
- by setting the "Default Privacy Setting" for individual fields

The options are: "public", "friends only" or "private". If you select "public" it means that the field or the whole profile repectively is visible to registered users, but not to visitors.

The RFE is this: add an option to both settings to allow the user to select everyone (i.e. also visitors). For this the labels will probably have to be changed; something similar to:

Make my profile visible to: "everyone", "registered users", "friends only" or "no-one"

This is both clear for the end user and makes sense for a designer (or content manager), since "everyone" and "registered users" would mean exactly the same as the groups of the same name.

If you think there's a better way to implement this RFE, by all means let me know.

Thanks,

Rogier