0605 — the member profile page

Context

Every thread post’s author column shows the same member — brandon, Site Admin, volcano avatar — with the name styled as a link that went nowhere. The board fiction says clicking a member opens their profile, and the profile wanted a joke: the Stanley Parable loading screen’s “The end is never the end is never the end…”, which is also this project’s roadmap in one sentence. In-place easter eggs and a typed animation were considered; the user chose a real profile page with the line scrolling endlessly through a labeled strip.

Decision

• /members/brandon/ renders the phpBB “Viewing profile” shape: the thread posts’ identity column (name, stars, role, avatar at 88px) beside a facts list, a “Personal text” strip below — SMF’s name for a profile’s free-text field, chosen over Signature (bottom-of-post furniture), persona fields (Occupation, Interests, Motto), and mechanism names (Marquee, MOTD, Ticker). thread-post’s author name and avatar become links, href derived as /members/{author}/.
• Every fact on the page is real or absent (the site’s own numbers rule): Total posts is siteThreads(...).length — the same count every thread post shows — Website is repositoryUrl, and Joined is the repo’s first commit date via a new firstCommitDate() on the existing commit-log walk in helpers/last-commit-date.ts (the walk is newest-first, so the date left standing after the loop is the first commit’s; no second git call). No invented location or last-visit.
• The personal text is two identical copies of “the end is never ” repeated, in a flex row inside an overflow-hidden box, both sliding translateX(-100%) on an infinite linear animation — the second copy lands where the first began, so the loop restarts invisibly. All lowercase: an endless sentence has no start to capitalize. The animation sits behind prefers-reduced-motion: no-preference; the static fallback is the line cut off at the box edge. The second copy is aria-hidden.
• Two route-local components under pages/members/_components/ (placement law: one route uses them), split as member-profile + member-personal-text by the ~80-line stylesheet rule. Route-local components sit outside the Storybook glob, as sandbox-post does, so they carry no stories.

Consequences

• The author column’s dead link is now a real one on every post, 404 and sandbox included; any future second author gets a profile URL for free and a 404 until a page exists.
• The commit-log walk now serves two facts (per-file newest date, repo oldest date) from its one history read.
• Below 640px the identity column folds into the same header strip thread-post uses.