disclaimer: i'm a LJ employee but not necessarily an apologist.
(And don't give me that "it was never meant to go live" crap - everything that goes to [info]changelog is already approved and is supposed to go live at the next code synchronization)
a lot of times we'll have FEATURES that we want to go live that have been approved. let's use something relatively innocuous as an example: v-gifts. the US side will give and tacitly approve "we want holiday v-gifts that should be this and that". the v-gifts are designed and their entry is coded and bundled into a release. the release is pushed to beta. then we see it for the first time and we all break into laughter because either the wording is wrong, the english translation doesn't make sense, or the icon itself is just a little off or unintentionally funny. did LJ "approve" the idea of the v-gift? of course. did we approve the FINAL product? heck no. we catch it in beta and send it back for revision or just eliminate it from the final production push.
i don't know what exactly happened with the gender spec, but it's very conceivable that LJ gave a broad directive: "Make people choose a gender on new accounts so we can do _____ better". someone not culturally attuned with LJ is going to take that and just run with it as best they know how.
so there's a lot of things we could improve here -- our international design specifications and release process quickly comes to mind -- but to attribute *this* specific case to maliciousness is a little harsh, i feel. especially when i was sitting right next to the people that were just as surprised as you were when this little nugget popped up. honestly, beta is for the LJ office as much as our beta users and allows us to catch a lot, A LOT, of things before they go live on our production servers.
(And don't give me that "it was never meant to go live" crap - everything that goes to [info]changelog is already approved and is supposed to go live at the next code synchronization)
a lot of times we'll have FEATURES that we want to go live that have been approved. let's use something relatively innocuous as an example: v-gifts. the US side will give and tacitly approve "we want holiday v-gifts that should be this and that". the v-gifts are designed and their entry is coded and bundled into a release. the release is pushed to beta. then we see it for the first time and we all break into laughter because either the wording is wrong, the english translation doesn't make sense, or the icon itself is just a little off or unintentionally funny. did LJ "approve" the idea of the v-gift? of course. did we approve the FINAL product? heck no. we catch it in beta and send it back for revision or just eliminate it from the final production push.
i don't know what exactly happened with the gender spec, but it's very conceivable that LJ gave a broad directive: "Make people choose a gender on new accounts so we can do _____ better". someone not culturally attuned with LJ is going to take that and just run with it as best they know how.
so there's a lot of things we could improve here -- our international design specifications and release process quickly comes to mind -- but to attribute *this* specific case to maliciousness is a little harsh, i feel. especially when i was sitting right next to the people that were just as surprised as you were when this little nugget popped up. honestly, beta is for the LJ office as much as our beta users and allows us to catch a lot, A LOT, of things before they go live on our production servers.
bt
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