47

https://stackoverflow.com/10m has this suggestion (last line):

Not a fan of teh twitters? No problem. Just add #SOreadytohelp to your "About Me" on your profile page.

(I am not a fan of teh twitters.) But doing so looks ... ahem ... silly:
https://stackoverflow.com/users/939860/erwin-brandstetter?tab=profile

Any better options?

Even after fixing the format like @gunr2171 suggested, it still seems odd that those among us who don't twitter have to add a twitter hashtag to the personal profile.

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  • 7
    If you put a space before the # then the # shows correctly
    – gunr2171
    Commented Aug 20, 2015 at 16:36
  • 12
    \#SOreadytohelp if you want it non bolded
    – nikoshr
    Commented Aug 20, 2015 at 16:36
  • 6
    @nikoshr: but will it still do the job? Commented Aug 20, 2015 at 16:37
  • @ErwinBrandstetter Ha, well, no idea:)
    – nikoshr
    Commented Aug 20, 2015 at 16:37
  • 18
    @ErwinBrandstetter welcome to social media, where things make little sense and people do it because everyone else is already doing it.
    – gunr2171
    Commented Aug 20, 2015 at 16:40
  • 1
    @gunr2171: and there I thought, we do things right on SO. :) Commented Aug 20, 2015 at 16:41
  • 2
    This would be avoided by a CommonMark syntax requirement that balpha and Shog9 have argued against.
    – user3717023
    Commented Aug 20, 2015 at 16:51
  • "Not a fan of teh twitters? No problem. Just add #SOreadytohelp to your "About Me" on your profile page." It seems you can do either or.
    – user4639281
    Commented Aug 20, 2015 at 16:56
  • 2
    Came here to post the exact same issue! If I add the hashtag to my profile, do I still get entered in to the draw to win the free swag? Commented Aug 20, 2015 at 17:15
  • 'teh', surely that should be 'the'. (I am not a fan of the twitters.) Commented Aug 21, 2015 at 4:38
  • 6
    @CodeUniquely: Nah, that seems to be on purpose. Commented Aug 21, 2015 at 13:12
  • 5
    Re 'teh': Because using misspelled definite articles before plurals of indefinite nouns is more teh funs than just using teh 'the'.
    – das-g
    Commented Aug 23, 2015 at 16:33
  • Well, to be honest it was so confusing the that "teh" that I was wondering if I'm misunderstanding that they mean twitter profile rather than SO profile! :-/
    – Neeku
    Commented Sep 11, 2015 at 13:12
  • What is the purpose of this? Why is the URL dead?
    – Nike
    Commented Feb 24, 2023 at 10:49

3 Answers 3

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If you type the hashtag on a single line in your About Me section it will render as a html header. Putting a space before the hash makes the symbol appear.

You don't want this

#This is what you want

#You don't want this

 #This is what you want

And for why Stack Exchange chose to use hashtags in your About Me, I don't know. It's a social media thing.

#DealWithIt


On a more serious note:

Hashtags are just temporary social media "tags", unique identifier to help filter out and categorize content. SE can easily find twitter messages using the provided hashtag, so they need something similar for SO profiles.

The pattern of a twitter hashtag is unique enough to not have already been used - so profiles containing it are easily searchable for the devs.

I mean, they could have used something else for SO profiles, but you might as well keep it uniform. This is, after all, a social media campaign.

How about we add a predefined guid to our profile! That's a programmer thing to do.

10 million questions! {434a403b-073d-458c-854c-0e5f89e9a758}
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    Tell me what we want, what we really, really want?
    – CubeJockey
    Commented Aug 20, 2015 at 16:48
  • 73
    NullReferenceException: object 'spiceGirls' has already been deallocated.
    – gunr2171
    Commented Aug 20, 2015 at 16:52
  • 5
    I'll add just for you that guid to my profile :-D
    – rekire
    Commented Aug 20, 2015 at 18:15
  • 2
    If you're finding that this advice doesn't work, you're probably adding the indented hashtag after a bulleted list, as I was. There's a workaround for this known gotcha here; basically you can insert an empty comment between the bullet list and the indented hashtag. (Also: if I'd known it was going to be this complicated, I'd just have tweeted in the first place...) Commented Aug 20, 2015 at 19:01
  • 1
    Maybe some 1500+ user can create a temporary soreadytohelp tag which MUST be used only in profile pages. Commented Aug 20, 2015 at 21:53
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Or you could just put that in a sentence:

like here #SOreadytohelp

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    Since I can't stop reading it as "So ready to help!" as in really ready to help, I added it as "I am #SOreadytohelp"
    – Kitalda
    Commented Aug 21, 2015 at 8:24
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    @Kitalda that may be the intent.
    – CubeJockey
    Commented Aug 21, 2015 at 13:23
2

Or add it as a code sample (prepending it with four spaces) and get a nice grey background... Will it work better than the other suggestions? No idea!

https://stackoverflow.com/users/377341/stratosgear?tab=profile

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