Livejournal Gender Field - reply from customer support

[marydell]

I sent a short note of distress to LJ about the proposed change in the gender field - here is their reply (posted with permission), for anyone who's interested.

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Thank you for taking the time to contact us with your concerns. We understand that gender is not binary, and intend to respect that understanding for our users.

At this time, the code you reference is not live on the site, and will not become so in the future. We know that you, and many other users, have serious concerns about any requirement to specify gender, so we'd like to take a moment to explain events and our position further.

The intention of this code was to change the sign-up process to include a field for the selection of gender; that the code would completely disable the "Unspecified" option at the same time was deemed unacceptable. While the code in question had gone to our beta (testing) server, it had not gone to our production server, and will not do so due to this problem. Furthermore, we'd like to clarify that code posted to the changelog community is not always final, as such code must then go through the beta testing process and can often be changed before actual implementation.

Additionally, some erroneous information has been spread regarding the potential public display of the gender field. We would like to clarify that gender is not currently publicly displayed on the profile, nor anywhere else on the site, and there are no plans to change this behavior.

Regards,
  LiveJournal Community Care Team

Comments

[viorica8957.livejournal.com]

Translation: "Oh shit, we pissed them off again! Backtrack! BACKTRACK!"

[geekosaur]

Actually, current evidence suggests this was trumped up (or possibly exaggerated) by Dreamwidth to try to get more LJ types to switch over. So much for "principles".

[aedifica]

Um, no, actually. I have it from knowledgeable people I trust, who are more familiar with LJ's internal processes than I, that this would not have gotten as near completion as it did if someone at LJ hadn't been planning on putting it in place.

[marydell.livejournal.com]

It does sound, from the message I received, that the code was put into beta with the unspecified option removed, and that was "deemed unacceptable" because of the reaction of beta testers. So based purely on this I wouldn't think it was trumped up.