Make default uneditable profile fields (location bio etc) appear at registration?

[h55h5h6]

Please go easy on me I'm not an expert programmer or anything :/ I really need to do this though, basically it's a Serious forum about activism stuff and want to encourage people to fill out the details about them if possible to make it easier to know what our audience is etc, easier to get in contact with if necessary etc, I figure if people do it first off you don't have the selection-bias of people that generally fill in forms for fun answering while more casual internet users ignore it

So yeah I was thinking it would be great if didn't rely on users visiting their own profile out of vanity and editing it there, which isn't very likely especially for more casual internet users. The options to edit your profile are not advertised very well after you first create an account which is another problem, with the My Profile toplink and the link from the username both going to their "normal" profile page where most of it is hidden from the average users' view by the new Visitor Messages tab

What I would like to do is have all the default bio fields like when you go the "Settings -> Profile" < profile.php?do=editprofile > page like Location, Age, ICQ/AIM/MSN/Yahoo/Skype/Occupation/Interests/Bio etc able to be added to the registration page like you can specify custom profile fields to be on the registration page or not. It seems odd you can't do this with the normal fields by default really.

Another thing I'd really like to do is be able to move the text fields on the registration page freely rather than the numbers actually only changing the sorting of custom profile fields, e.g. I would like to be able to put the optional field for Real Name right below the username and password fields so it's prominent (and encourages the users to use their real names as their usernames a bit to make the debate look more professional and academic)

Thank you for any help *cross fingers* :S

Really, this isn't really ideal since it could make the registration page look bloated and possibly put some people off, especially with the 30-option multiple choice questions (I've added one of those already), another thing that could be really helpful would be for there to be some kind of reminder to users that have never updated their profile to do so, and fix the links on the top (Your profile and the link from the username name) to actually go to the same page as Settings>Edit profile instead of a sort of meta-edit page where you can only change some of the options like it does at the moment..... It's very user unfriendly and when it's so important to have this information about our users it is very disappointing...

it could be nice to have the best of both worlds really.. I just don't get why there apparently hasn't been much thought to usability and gearing it to be intuitive to people that are not hardcore internet users really especially in this age of even professionals using Facebook etc. When you go to edit your profile, it should go to edit your profile, there should not be two separate edit pages with partial options on each

( licensed customer hence the being able to post in this subforum, don't mind the silly name )

[Floris]

Easiest fix here is to just remove the default values from the templates, and make new custom templates and put those fields in the templates instead.