Privacy and anonymity

Nine switches, two of which override the rest. What each one hides, from whom, and what anonymity cannot do.

Privacy here is a layered system: a handful of narrow switches, and two broad ones that override them. Reading the broad ones first will save you setting seven switches you did not need.

The two broad switches

anonymousbooleandefault false

The master anonymity switch. With it on, non-staff viewers get “this member is anonymous” instead of a profile, and you become unlinkable from anywhere on the site.

fullAnonymousbooleandefault false

Full anonymous. Implies every other privacy opt-out below, regardless of how each is individually set.

It is stored separately from anonymous rather than overwriting the other switches, so turning full-anonymous back off restores your own choices instead of leaving you with everything hidden.

Anonymity applies to strangers, not friends — unless you say so

By default, accepted friends still see you normally. anonApplyToFriends makes anonymity apply to them too. The common case is “hide from strangers, not from friends”, which is why it is off.

The narrow switches

All default to on — the site is public by default:

Switch Hides
showProfile Your profile page
showPublic You in the member browser
hideFromLists You from listings generally — stronger than showPublic, which only governs the browser
showActivity Your activity feed
showFriends Your friends list
showFollowers Your followers list
showStatusUpdates Your status posts
showMedia Your gallery contributions
showGameHistory Which servers and parties you have played on

What anonymity does not do

It is not deletion. Your items still exist and are still yours; they just stop being attributable to a visible profile.

It does not hide you from staff. Moderators can always see who authored what — a site where a moderator cannot identify the account behind a report is a site with no moderation.

It does not reach the game server you deliberately connected to. There is one place a party roster is served without anonymity applied: the integration API’s party read, served to a credential belonging to the server the party is being played on.

The reason is worth stating plainly: that credential’s whole job is to reconcile our roster against the game’s player list, and a member hidden from it could never be matched — so their play time and score would silently never be recorded. Site visitors see the anonymised roster; the server you chose to connect to sees that you are there. It returns display names and ids and nothing else — no email, no profile.

Party anonymity

A party has its own showUsers switch, which decides whether its roster is disclosed at all. Your personal anonymity is applied on top of that, so a party that shows its roster still does not show you if you are anonymous.

Blocking

Blocking a member is separate from all of the above. It is under Account → Blocked, and it governs interaction rather than visibility.