(no subject)
...Okay, looks like panic's over. This time, and only (I suspect) because people were paying attention.
For people who haven't, LJ attempted to introduce code that would force users to pick a gender - male or female. No 'Unspecified', no option to leave it blank.
Unsurprisingly, what with this being offensive and upsetting to trans/queer/genderqueer/intersex people and potentially dangerous for women, people got a LITTLE BIT PISSED OFF.
And, as (sometimes) happens when sufficient numbers of LJ users get pissed off, it actually works.
To wit, email received by DW user synecdochic and posted here:
thank you for your feedback. This is all very informative, I received many email with this already.
However, the code update that you refer to is not live and did not have any chance to go live. That was a beta release, we always push code to beta to see if everything works correctly. In many cases it does not and we either fix bugs or pull the code from the final release plan.
We were going to add a gender field to the sign up user flow, which is fine, but by mistake it became a mandatory "female/male" field for everyone. This is why this is not going live. And this is what beta releases are for, to see problems and solve them before any user faces a problem.
I would appreciate if you share this information with your friends that are also concerned.
Best regards,
--
Anjelika Petrochenko
GM, LiveJournal US
Looks like it's okay, folks. This time, anyway.
For people who haven't, LJ attempted to introduce code that would force users to pick a gender - male or female. No 'Unspecified', no option to leave it blank.
Unsurprisingly, what with this being offensive and upsetting to trans/queer/genderqueer/intersex people and potentially dangerous for women, people got a LITTLE BIT PISSED OFF.
And, as (sometimes) happens when sufficient numbers of LJ users get pissed off, it actually works.
To wit, email received by DW user synecdochic and posted here:
thank you for your feedback. This is all very informative, I received many email with this already.
However, the code update that you refer to is not live and did not have any chance to go live. That was a beta release, we always push code to beta to see if everything works correctly. In many cases it does not and we either fix bugs or pull the code from the final release plan.
We were going to add a gender field to the sign up user flow, which is fine, but by mistake it became a mandatory "female/male" field for everyone. This is why this is not going live. And this is what beta releases are for, to see problems and solve them before any user faces a problem.
I would appreciate if you share this information with your friends that are also concerned.
Best regards,
--
Anjelika Petrochenko
GM, LiveJournal US
Looks like it's okay, folks. This time, anyway.