Hide Online Status on the Forum - Why?

In your profile preferences you can select 'yes' to hide your online status.

Why do people hide their online status?

I have no idea? Maybe they don't want people to see them lurking?

Maybe they're avoiding people.. Or they don't want people to know they have no life outside of the forum.

I hide my online status everywhere. I always have. It makes me feel more comfortable for some reason. I go back and forth with it here, not really for lurking reasons since you can lurk without logging in. Probably for the same reason I hide my status everywhere else I guess haha

Now that I think about it, this is the only forum board where I don't hide my status.
I used to switch to offline mode to avoid getting PMs more frequently in other communities.

I didn't actually realise you could do this. I remember looking for Jenn for some reason or another a while back and could never see her name in the active in the last 48 hours bit at the bottom. I assumed she was on holiday or taking a break from the forum!

sororityalpha wrote:

In your profile preferences you can select 'yes' to hide your online status.

Why do people hide their online status?

At one point in time you yourself had your status hidden. Why did you hide your status? Whatever your reason was is probably why a lot of people do it. Not everyone who is into researching Columbine and all these other crimes want to make it known publicly. A lot of people are just lurking too. There's a ton of reasons why someone will hide that they are online.

A side note: A little bit about hidden statuses - If you hide your status you will not show up on the online list and you will not show up on "members online in the last 48 hours" list.

Only I and the moderators are able to see who is on the hidden list. If you're hidden, you're still visible to everyone on the staff and that includes the "48 hours" list.

If you are hidden you can still see your name and it will be italicized.

I hid my status one time for a very short period of time because I noticed others did.

It did not appeal to me so I never hid my online status again after that.

Jenn wrote:

Why did you hide your status?

Thank you for asking and you read my reply - I tried it once because others did it.

So may you tell me Jenn why you hide your online status?

Thank you.

I usually only browse this forum for a couple minutes each day, but I leave the tab open so I can switch to it later. I (used to) do this so people don't think I'm watching the forum for 12 hours straight

I am now hiding my online status because I don't need other people knowing when I was last online.

Kiwik wrote:

I hide my online status everywhere. I always have. It makes me feel more comfortable for some reason. I go back and forth with it here, not really for lurking reasons since you can lurk without logging in. Probably for the same reason I hide my status everywhere else I guess haha

I have always done that as well. It did take me a little while to figure out that I could do it on the Forum. But as soon as I realized that I could do it/how to do it I did. No real reason in particular, it's just a personal preference.