Handles and Public Profiles Are Free Now

You can now claim a handle on a free rifts.to account. That gets you a page at rifts.to/u/yourname with your name, a short bio, and whichever of your polls you decide to put on it.

This used to be part of Pro. It is free as of today, for anyone signed in.

Why it moved

Charging for a handle meant the page went away when the card did. A subscription lapses, and every link anyone had ever shared to that profile answers 404 — the same answer a stranger gets for a handle nobody has ever claimed. Nothing tells the visitor which one happened.

A name you can lose that way is not much of a name. So the handle, the bio, the page and the listing all moved to the free account together. What you pay for is what your surveys do, not who you are.

Nothing appears on it until you say so

Claiming a handle publishes nothing at all. Every survey on your account page has its own Show on profile switch, and it starts off.

Most polls are asked of one room on one afternoon. "Which of these three dates works?" belongs to the people who were there and nowhere else, and a page that swept up everything you ever ran would be wrong far more often than it was useful. Pick the ones people are meant to find.

The switch works in both directions at any time, whatever you pay us. Taking something off your own public page was never something we would hold behind a subscription.

Picking one

Three to thirty characters, lowercase letters, numbers and hyphens. First come, first served, and a handful of words are reserved so a profile can't look like part of the site itself.

You can change it later. When you do, the old address is released and stops resolving, so anything already pointing at it breaks. Worth settling on one before you print it on a slide.

What the page shows

Your display name, your bio, and the surveys you switched on, each one marked open or closed. Closed surveys stay listed — someone following the link still lands on the poll and sees that voting has finished.

Expired surveys drop off on their own. A free survey stops taking answers seven days after you make it, and once that happens it leaves the page rather than advertising a poll that can no longer be answered. On a free account, a profile shows what you are running now. Pro surveys never expire, so they stay listed until you take them off yourself.

Claiming one

An account is a six-digit code sent to your email address; there is no password to make and no card to enter. Sign in, open your account page, and the handle picker is in the Public profile section. Fill it in, then switch on the polls you want listed.

If you already had a profile from a Pro subscription that has since lapsed, your handle, bio and choices are all still there. The page is simply back.