Recent code changes require gender for sign up and profile edits, has only male/female options

[foxfirefey]

So, as noted by

Comments

[pne]

What's next in targetting ads? Ethnicity (so people of African descent get certain ads, "Hispanic" people other ads, etc.?) Religion (so some people get offered rosaries, others pentacles)?

[foxfirefey]

Well, to be fair, they've already been using gender in ad targeting. My guess is that the ads served to people who have a gender specified out perform ads served to people who do not.

[eruditeviking]

A lot of companies are moving to require you to disclose your gender and do not give the options for privacy or inter-sexed individuals. I'm rather disturbed by this trend and have been fighting with Yahoo and AT&T over their recent demands that I supply a gender to them for services provided. I see absolutely no reason to provide that information to them, or more to the point the third parties they want to transfer or sell said information to.

[trixieleitz]

The part about requiring existing users to specify one of two genders may have been unintended, but it still looks from that message that the part about requiring new accounts to specify one of two genders was deliberate. I'm sure I'm not the only one who has a huge problem with that.

[foxfirefey]

No. Requiring existing users to specify one of two genders was at least as intentional as the new users signing up and part of the second code change. The following code involving the profile edit page (htdocs/manage/profile/index.bml
), setting up error checking and making an error message saying gender must be specified does not happen unintentionally by the programmer (although, like I said, it could happen by miscommunication):

+ # gender
+ unless ($POST{gender} =~ /^F|M$/){
+ push @errors => $ML{'.error.gender.not_specified'};
+ }
+

[trixieleitz]

Thanks for that. Yes, miscommunication is the most charitable explanation, but I'm sure there would have been plenty of opportunities to fix that before it got as far as public entries on changelog and beta testing.

[av8rmike]

What's the big deal? Nobody is verifying the location, age, schools, interests, or any of half a dozen other things one fills in in the profile. Why not just pick one gender setting and be done with it?

[pne]

What's the big deal? [...] Why not just pick one gender setting and be done with it?

Whom are you addressing here? SUP or individual users?

one gender setting?

[redbird]

It's not about proving it, it's about being asked to pick one of two choices, when they may seem both wrong, or nobody's business.

If gender were a free-text field like interests, this would be much less objectionable.

But, since you ask: okay, you are now female.

Re: one gender setting?

[av8rmike]

Eh, I've been called worse. I already see ads for weight loss here on the site, and it hardly offends me.

[stratogratte]

LJ really has changed a lot since they became part of sixapart..

If some people are searching for alternatives, but who still like how lj used to be, there are. I have created an lj-based website back in 2004, we aren't a lot but it has everything (and more) that lj had good to offer and with no ads at all.

You are welcome to join us on http://www.iziblog.net

[foxfirefey]

I work on an open source fork myself at Dreamwidth.