Age on profile is incorrect if it's not been your birthday this year!

[nicktolhurst]

Since the site only asks for the year of birth it doesn't know my actual age, only how old I will be this year!

A fix could be to perhaps:

1. omit this detail from the profile.
2. require full date of birth on signup.

[PerpetualCreativity]

@nicktolhurst

Another great catch.

2. require full date of birth on signup.

This is what we should be doing, so that we know if someone is 12 or 13... not sure if we want to store the birthday though as I'd rather we collect as little data (especially sensitive data like birthdates) as possible.

[ethanlshen]

My bad.
The reason why we have the year of birth field is that we have limitations on what people under 13 can do on our site. Our current stance is that we don't want to ask for a full DOB because our sign up is already cluttered, and we do not want to collect more private information than we need. I'm curious to hear what more you have to say though.

[nicktolhurst]

Makes sense!

One option would be to use an age-verification cookie. That would seem like the best way to avoid storing PII. It could be stripped out of the signup form and be implemented similar to this GIST: https://gist.github.com/alison-mk/edffb54e5dc088fdd35a

Another nice option would be to ask for 'profile' details after an email verification step. Feels like a much nicer place to have the 'clutter' of a signup form.

I think option 1 would have the nicest UX and also be the easiest to implement.

[PerpetualCreativity]

That gist is pretty interesting - something similar could definitely work on Mutorials.

I haven't searched yet, but I think the only place that uses age to restrict features (currently) is /changeProfile in routes/settings.js (which prevents people under 13 from putting real name, location, etc in their profile).