Hi, @ashley & rest of the maintainers,
I wanted to ask about your opinion. I'll be happy to contribute for solving the issue, if the SocialTools team accepts the idea, and we choose the best option :)

Hmm, so essentially $wgHiddenPrefs but for SocialProfile? Neat idea!

In T269798, @Kam193 wrote:

use $wgUserProfileDisplay to determine if user should or not be able to edit a section - preferred by me, but breaks the rule that displaying in profile is not the same as possibility to use a feature;

While I'm certainly not opposed to introducing a new config global, this seems like the logical solution; if something is not shown on profile pages, would there really be much of a reason to be able to...edit something no-one else will ever see?

That said, one issue with this approach that I can think of is that perhaps we want more fine-grained control than what is currently possible, e.g. instead of hiding "Personal information" section only hide "Hometown" and "Current location", etc.

In T269798#6693506, @ashley wrote:

if something is not shown on profile pages, would there really be much of a reason to be able to...edit something no-one else will ever see?

Exactly. How surprised I was, when I realized that user can edit hidden parts of the profile :)

Fine-grained control seems perfect, but it's more work and not backward compatible, I think. Maybe I can create the basic version, using current config, and we can separate changing the control as a new ticket?

$wgUserProfileDisplay controls more than just user information (e.g. last activity etc.), so probably we shouldn't just replace section-keys with single-data-keys direct here, what do you think? Or eventually, we can use both: section and single data (hometown etc). To display/edit information, both section and information keys need to be enabled + we're backward compatible.