Board Game Arena

Looking into the problem with accessing user profiles led in an interesting, but unrelated direction.

As noted in that thread, the structure of the URL linking to profiles from the forum differs from the links from other sources like the search bar or game history.

From the forum: Same user (me) from the search bar or game history: There are two different unique IDs (u and id) referencing the same player depending on which way you access the profile. I'm hypothesizing that the forum identifier (u) is just mapped to the main BGA identifier (id) behind the scenes, or at least it used to be when that was working. I noticed that my forum identifier 746295 is a couple orders of magnitude smaller than my BGA identifier 85477595, even though I first registered for the forum the day after I got my BGA account. So all things being equal and assuming these numbers are assigned sequentially, it seems like only about 1 in 115 BGA users actually ever even register on the forums, and that doesn't mean they actually even look at them regularly.

Just as a reasonableness check about this hypothesis, I went through everyone on my friends list. Only 2 out of 24 have any post history at all. One of them may not count because I specifically met him through the forums. The other I met through playing the same game on BGA.

But no posts from anyone else that I first knew IRL, including some I know are very active in gaming both on and off BGA. One of them runs a game publishing company and I know he has a forum account and lurks the forums because he ribbed me about having too many posts.

For course maybe all of them have forum accounts and just never post, but that would be out of line with the discrepancy between my forum identifier and my BGA identifier.

At the Top left of the FAQ there is the hamburger menu of the forum software were we find links to all unread posts as well as a membeelist containing members with 0 posts, you should find your lurking friend there:

https://boardgamearena.com/forum/memberlist.php

varietyCH wrote: ↑23 December 2025, 09:05 At the Top left of the FAQ there is the hamburger menu of the forum software were we find links to all unread posts as well as a membeelist containing members with 0 posts, you should find your lurking friend there:

https://boardgamearena.com/forum/memberlist.php

That's awesome! Thanks. I think I've only ever opened that menu once before, and never tried that option.

That was fascinating. For the most part, the people who didn't show up at all didn't surprise me. But there was a surprise there: one person I knew had never posted, but would also have bet an unreasonable amount of money had never even registered on the forums.