New support system: Tender

I've upgraded the Carbon Diet to use a great new integrated support system called Tender. You can create your own discussions, questions, and search the FAQs easily. In time, it will replace the existing (and very out-of-date) forum completely. One advantage is you don't have to log in separately to use it, which is an improvement.

I've had to make a change to the privacy policy to handle this; because we know automatically sign you in to Tender, we do provide some details to them, but this only happens when you actually go and visit the support site.

Privacy policy change

This week I'm finally working on the social aspect of the Carbon Diet site. Testers will see a new "public" option on their settings page, and a "search" link which will let them search for public profiles. However, because I've now got down to the practicalities of implementing and using this system, I need to make a small change to the privacy policy. The old "public profiles" section said:

If you make your profile 'public', your emissions data will be visible to anyone who visits the site, but we will not make any personally-identifiable information (name, email address, etc.) visible to any other user of the site unless you explicitly allow us to (mainly in the case of adding 'friends' on the site who can see your personal data).

The new one now says:

If you make your profile 'public', your 'display name', country, and emissions data will be visible to anyone who visits the site. However, we will not make any contact information (email address, website, etc.) visible to any other user of the site unless you explicitly tell us to (mainly in the case of adding 'friends' on the site who can see your personal data).

I need to make the display name and country public simply because at least a bit of information is needed in order to be able to find someone's profile. However, you set your own display name, so you can use an alias or even leave it blank if you want to, so this shouldn't cause any problems. If anyone does have any comments on this, please leave them below or on the forum.

Major change to usernames

At the suggestion of a number of people, I've made a pretty major change today to the way that the login system works. Rather than requiring an email address, it now lets you sign up with a username instead. That way, you don't have to give us your email address unless you want to, once your account is created. It should reduce the signup barriers and improve privacy for users, both of which are good things. It also helps with some of the other stuff I will be doing this week.

If you already have a Carbon Diet account, when you next log in (using your email address) you will be prompted to choose a username to identify yourself. Once you've done that, you should use that username to log in from that time onwards.