• for simplicity of the user interface for end-users, how about making the syntax for properties of user profiles somewhat compatible with 'metadata' properties from regular pages?

• are these properties already available from the reporting plugin?

• for customizability, how about allowing the site admin to overload the ~ symbol with a custom user macro. That way, it could be customized to return any number of properties, or even to point to an external user profile, but still use the standard confluence syntax to refer to users.

I can imagine a series of useful parameters for the user profile macro.

Something like: [~username:username|phone|email] would return their user name, phone number and email address from their profile.

...like: [~username:username=mailto|phone] would render their user name, but the link would be open email to to their address, and their phone number.

I'd like something similar with userlister (i.e. {userlister:group=groupname|username=mailto|phone}

Also, how about [mailto:~username] rendering as the user's name in the profile, but behaving like [mailto:username@company.com].

Or we could extend the userlister to handle something along those lines.

Nick,
Agreed - it's a small detail which could be very useful.

Cheers,
Nick

In conjunction with CONF-3017, you could then do something like:
username:phone - which would still render a link to the users profile, but using the phone number as the text.