litphoria

Because right now, if someone fills in all of their traits, it looks like this: puu.sh

There's a ton of clutter, and every new category that's added creates even more clutter.

You say clutter, I say 50-point bullet list of every possible area of compatibility with a built in system to automatically highlight areas that are incompatible. It is only clutter because you are using almost none of it.

Well, yes. That's entirely my point. If I'm not using something, it's useless. If someone else isn't using it, it's useless. It gets in the way.

Not all traits are created equally. For sexual roleplay, gender is going to be a bigger deal than knowing that a character has no amputations. For bdsm roleplay, a person's d/s role is more important than the appearance of their nipples. Just about everything is going to be more important than what their loyalty is.

But then, that's just my opinion. Someone else might consider those things very important, and want to have an "at a glance" way to see those. The idea behind the suggestion is that the profile creator can fill in the content to their heart's content, but the one browsing it can filter it in the way that they want as well, most efficiently seeing those parts most important to them.

If I'm taking a first look at a profile, I too find most traits irrelevant, and I'd be happy with something that lets me see just a few that I pick out. (Plus any trait that matches a dislike could be shown automatically anyway to warn me?)

Eventually though it is probably important to look at every trait for someone you might be interested in, so there should be a Show All thing.

I agree with this. Highlighted or not, a 50-point bullet list is a 50-point bullet list, and it's always going to look at least a little cluttered.

There are a number of traits I'm never going to care about or use as search criteria, and being able to filter them out so that profiles are 'cleaner' would be good.

Maybe this could be implemented in this way: If you have selected traits for your current profile, and put preferences/likes/dislikes in on some of those traits, then those are defined as the ones that are 'important' for you.

And like now, how we can select whether someone's profile comes up with Traits expanded or not, we could select whether the profiles we view are filtered by our current profile's chosen preferences. Thus it would first show as filtered down, but then you could expand to full, unfiltered with a click.

That seems like a low-cost way of getting the feature into people's hands while encouraging preference use. It wouldn't make sense to have an 'important' trait which you have no preferences on.

Hm.. But it might discourage people from setting preferences on things they're not 100% set on so as to avoid them being marked 'important'. Maybe the ones you set a preference on just check some checkbox by default which you could then check or uncheck?

That sounds pretty user friendly to me.

This has potential.

I like the checkbox idea too. I'm the kind that always adds almost every trait, and then tries to set honest preferences on every single one. I tend to get Platinum with over 80% completion on my profile. Yet, I would definitely use the feature to set a list of key traits that I want to see by default that would be tightly focused. (As it is now, I actually have everything collapsed fully by default. Having the option to show just certain traits would be my new preferred way to view profiles.) Then when wanting to get a fuller picture, clicking to expand and go through the full list would be great.