How do you find another user on Y!A?

How do I find a user's profile from his or her Quora User ID?

• For example, say I want to find the profile of the user with the User ID 15936. This is a follow-up question to .

• Answer:

  The user who has the id #15936 is . I found a method to get the name (which gives you the profile) of an user from their id. It’s a little bit complicated, so I’ll explain with images. First, here is how it works: When you put your mouse over an user picture, an is displayed with the name of the user, their user picture, and their bio. Behind the scenes, a script makes a call to Quora’s servers, asking “hey server, could you give me the info of user number #XXX”, then the servers reply “Ok little script, I found the user from the id you gave us, here is their info”. So, the trick is to make a fake call, to let the servers believe we are this script. It sounds simple, but the script also send some other data, which has an expiration date. So we have to read this data somewhere, quickly make our requests, and then read again some other data to make more requests. If you don’t send this data with your request, the servers reply something like “it seems like you’re not a Quora script, sorry, we can’t answer your request”. Note: I made the screenshots with Chromium, but it should work with Chrome, Safari, Firefox (with Firebug) and others. First, go on a page where you can find some user pictures, and open the Network panel of Chrome Dev Tools (https://developers.google.com/chrome-developer-tools/docs/shortcuts) Click on the clear button at the bottom, to remove uninteresting stuff Move your mouse over an user picture. You should see a new request to server_call_POST Click on this request and scroll down to “Form Data” in the new panel. On my screenshot, you can see more requests, we don’t care of them. The three important values are window_id, parent_cid, parent_domid, and of course the uid field in json’s value. The other values don’t change, and some of them can me omitted. Keep these values somewhere for the next step (you can open another page on Quora in a next tab for the next step, and then switch tabs to copy/paste these values) Open the console panel of Chrome Dev Tools (Ctrl+Shift+J), and copy/paste the JS code which is at the end of this answer. Then press “Enter”, and enter the following code, where you have to replace the values you got on the previous step: var getName = nameGetter("<window_id>", "<parent_cid>", "<parent_domid>"); (replace <window_id> with window_id’s value (on my screenshot it’s dep9-4371…), and do the same for other values. You can now call the getName function with any id. Just type getName( 1234 ) (where 1234 is the id), and press “Enter”. You may have to wait some time (up to a few seconds) before seeing the name (or an error, if you’re unlucky). As you can see on the screenshot, has the id #1234. After a few minutes, you may get some errors, so move your mouse over another avatar, and repeat the steps 3,4,5 and 7. -- Here is the code mentioned in the step 6: function nameGetter( w_id, p_cid, p_domid ) { return function getName( id ) { $.ajax( 'https://www.quora.com/webnode2/server_call_POST', { type: 'post', data: { json: '{"args":[],"kwargs":{"uid":' + id + '}}', formkey:"ac61dadfcae1da2abb0873f38921a072", window_id: w_id, parent_cid: p_cid, parent_domid: p_domid, __vcon_json:'["cls","a.view.user","PhotoTooltip", "5CU7Sw7+jK6hc5"]', __vcon_method:"load_menu" }, success: function( o ) { if ( o.exception ) { console.log( "Error: " + o.exception.args[0] ); } else { console.log( $( 'img', o.value.html ).first().attr( 'alt' ) ); } } }); }; } Here is a minified version: function nameGetter(d,a,c){return function b(e){$.ajax("https://www.quora.com/webnode2/server_call_POST",{type:"post",data:{json:'{"args":[],"kwargs":{"uid":'+e+"}}",formkey:"ac61dadfcae1da2abb0873f38921a072",window_id:d,parent_cid:a,parent_domid:c,__vcon_json:'["cls","a.view.user","PhotoTooltip", "5CU7Sw7+jK6hc5"]',__vcon_method:"load_menu"},success:function(f){if(f.exception){console.log("Error: "+f.exception.args[0])}else{console.log($("img",f.value.html).first().attr("alt"))}}})}}; Disclaimer: I’ve no access to Quora data, I don’t work for Quora, I found this by doing some reverse-engineering on the website.