What are retired profile fields?

The structure of the profile page used to include three categories—Fields of Expertise, Hobbies & Interests, and Place I’ve Lived—that are no longer used. They’re retired. But if you had them filled in, they remain available for the time being so you can capture their content if you want to.

@Jeruba any idea why they are going down the drain?

No, other than that this was part of the revamping of the profile page months ago. There might have been a blog announcement about it back when it happened.

Instead we now get to fill in something called “Your Story,” which is more free-form and longer. Having our descriptive options more open does seem to suit many of us better.

Ahh, so is this why we can’t get the “autobiographer” award anymore?

@KatetheGreat You should still be able to get that award for filling out your ‘story’.

The old fields were treated like “topics”, even though they weren’t listed like them. So the info just got merged into topics. Some people had stuff in those fields that won’t really work in topics, so we saved it in case they wanted to transfer it to their story.

There are now so many profiles that are completely empty. I liked it better when there was a guideline of what info you should include and I always thought it should be mandatory to fill it in. Sure anyone can lie, but at least you would know something about the person by the way they lied!!!

They are vast meadows were profiles go to live their last days after a life of toil.