Short answer: I think I've fixed it - Blaketon, if you'd like to attempt to change your profile now, you should have the [Edit Profile] link alongside your username which will allow you to change the setting. Sorry for the inconvenience.
Long answer: Like all the little 'quirks' that arise with our board, the huge majority of the time taken is not in changing the setting, it's finding out what has made it happen in the first instance. Why wasn't that particular user allowed to change a profile setting? Well I have a 'normal' user profile too, so I logged into that one instead and the Edit Profile link was present and correct. Okay, what makes me different to Blaketon? Eventually I discovered that my 'normal' profile and Blaketon were members of two different groups of members - users, and registered users. Why are there two groups for the same thing? Who knows - it's lost in the mists of time before me.
But that's what set me looking in the right place, because I discovered a setting that isn't the same between the two - Edit User Profile. In one of the various updates that are issued for the software our board is running was a modification that disabled the ability for users to edit their profiles until they had reached certain criteria, apparently to prevent spammers registering and then filling their profile fields with spam links. That update rolled by some time ago, but the modification was among a huge list of bug-fixes and code edits and modifications that are rolled into every upgrade that the board does, and No, I don't sit and go through them each time they come out and try to identify changes - I have other tings to do too! It would have been easier to track down but for the fact that this particular update didn't upset things, it simply provided the
ability for profile field editing to be turned off for some users. Only later in a
different update did phpbb decide in its wisdom to change the default setting for a particular set of groups, from 'can change profile' to 'cannot change profile', and the default setting on our own board for 'users' was set to that group type, while for 'registered users' it wasn't!
If I hadn't noticed that my normal permissions profile and Blaketons were in different groups, I'd still now be looking for the cause - only blind luck found it. And that's how it usually happens, a user tells me something isn't working, and I put on my Sherlock Holmes hat and go digging. Sometimes it's immediately obvious, most times it takes an hour or two, occasionally I never actually find out what happened or why. I usually devote some time to it and have a good look, but then leave it and go and do something else instead to clear my head and come back to it later, but I hope that's an insight into the nightmare of looking after this board! I'm not bemoaning my lot - well, not today anyway - I'm simply explaining that my simply wanting to put something right isn't necessarily enough to make that change happen, and if (okay, when) I get crotchety it's usually a mix of frustration that I can't find the answer and/or irritation with myself for not spotting the solution earlier! Here endeth the lesson
