If you hover over a topic, a box appears with “add topic”. Click that and it adds the topic to your profile.

Okay, thank you.

Another thing I wanted to mention, why are some of my topics now gone?

It’s a little more difficult now. We’ll be adding a couple new ways to add topics in the future but we didn’t want to delay the rest of it. Don’t worry, we know it’s more difficult right now and we are already working on resolving that.

Many topics were disabled since they aren’t actual bodies of knowledge. We’re working on cleaning up the topics so we can help people find questions more easily. If you’d like to see your old fields of expertise, hobbies & interests and places, go to “My Account” and then click “View retired profile fields”. You may want to move some of what was there into your story.

Yeah I guess Xena isn’t very educational…BUT I TAKE IT TO HEART MAN. Lol. Anyways thanks.

I deleted my topics! Guess I’ll wait to add more. I’m excited for the changes!

@Symbeline the algorithm for disabling topics wasn’t perfect so we’re re-enabling ones that make sense and I’d say Xena is one.

Yeah I get that, I’m not saying I’m complaining or nothing, I was just kinda bamboozled. And thanks for bringing Xena back. :)

The good: “your mom” is still available as a topic.

The bad: “hostile negotiations” is gone (as are “witty inanity”, “inane wit” and “stupid jokes”, which might not be so serious, but are totally legit, IMO).

The ugly: WTF HAPPENED TO “ORDERING SANDWICHES”?!?!?!

Seriously, though, I’m not a fan of this whole “the topics on your profile have to make sense” thing, but that’s just me. I mean, I understand it on the questions, but on one’s profile? * shakes head disapprovingly *

Askin for it isn’t there anymore, either.

I don’t blame anyone for taking that out though.

’‘Makes Bob a sympathy sandwich’’.

Dude it’s got meat in it. :D

@bob_ It’s because those topics are the same ones (for questions and on your profile) and we’re focused on cleaning up the topics so we can do new and awesome things with them. I should probably write a blog post so that vision makes sense to everyone. If you’d like to be witty do it in your story.

I’ll explain a couple reasons why having things like “inane wit” and others don’t help us out.

1. If you want to improve the auto-complete functionality on asking a question finding crap in there isn’t going to help.
2. If we build a way to browse topics or make suggestions for topics to add to your profile, it’s be great if it did look like we’re suggesting “cats that look like hitler” to you or letting you find that under “technology”.
3. If we want to do any smart algorithmic things with analyzing text and figuring out what it’s about a messy dataset really totally screws us over. Imagine if you could just ask your question and we could automatically assign it topics.
4. You’d never be able to see that you have interests in common with people if everyone wrote mini-bios of oh-so-witty text in their topics.
5. There’s a million reasons but it’s late and I’m going to just say trust me, we’re handicapped if we don’t clean up the topics.

Oh, I trust you, sarcasm and all.

I trust @bob_. Just saying. Sandwich?

@zen_ Do you even have to ask?

No. But I caught your attention. It’s like PMing, but faster. How you been?

@zen_ Not bad. Yourself? Word on the street is that you’re getting ultimatums lately. What’s up with that?

Awww, she’s worth it. I’ll just have to bite the bullet.

@zen_ Where are you moving to?

To another social community website.

How would one add topics if you have no topics in your profile to begin with? There’s nothing to hover over, so the pop-up does not appear?

@BarnacleBill You can add topics from questions or someone else’s profile.

@bob_ I wish ‘your mom’ was disabled, personally. There are only three questions that contain it as a topic. It doesn’t make sense on two of the questions (not even in a comical way) and the other question is more of a legitimate question. (I am fighting the urge to remove the topic from all three questions.) As you can see, no one is even using that topic in either a serious sense or comical one so why even have it? I love jokes. I like memes. I use plenty of them and see why they need to be there; however, if no one is even using it then why keep it around?

@free_fallin I agree. As I said, I am in favor of “serious” topics on questions (even if it means losing topics like this one), and if the topics on our profiles will come from the same base, then they should also be serious. I can (try to) be witty elsewhere, as @timtrueman so kindly suggested.

Please note that my “protest” is completely light-hearted, more of an “aww, man!” kind of thing than “HEY MAN, WHAT THE HELL?”

@bob_ heh Nice topic. :D