Yeah, the FS secret was weird--almost trolly. But more traffic is good.
--- And here is where I get myself in trouble.
I've got... mixed feelings about the DA kerfluffle yesterday. I hang out in the women-and-LGBT-dominated corners of the US comics fandom, so I am uncomfortably well-informed about many things like the non-gender issue. I respect the opinions, but I think sometimes folk take it too far to extremes as well. There are mutually respectful ways to get things done, and then there is trollery, willful ignorance, screaming matches, dismissing someone's entire opinion on grounds of assuming they are racist/ablist/sexist/etc regardless of if that is true, and etc.
DA shouldn't have removed the non-gender option to begin with, but I think people deeply involved in the LGBT community forget that to people not so involved, it just didn't occur to them as an issue. It's not malice, it's ignorance, and polite discourse and information is the best way to fix things. Internet mobs is not.
As a code monkey, I get why they took out the "unspecified" that used to be there. It didn't matter to DA before. When they retooled the site for v7, they started incorporating the gender setting into how the information pages generated sentences (his/her). They also started using it to target the advertising. Sure, I'm a paid member, but the site lives based on ad revenue. Not enough of us pay to make up for the number that don't. Advertisers will pay more for targeted ads. It's worth it for DA to do that. Whomever coded the site probably honestly did not even know there are people that don't have a gender identity, and coded as they understand the world, as the marketers want and need the site to operate. For the sake of allowing customer/user privacy, they set it so that you could choose to hide your selected gender. Due diligence in their minds and level of information. Now, they overlooked that the info pages would still display he/she, but when you're re-coding a site that large things like that are not a priority. Making sure complex things like the gallery systems, layouts with various ad sizes, search options and etc are functioning properly, etc are the priority. Again, no one meant to offend, and they had a lot of problems with the galleries and image auto-resizing when v7 initially rolled out months ago. No one in the site admin even thought of this as a problem. A polite contact to the admin (I mean an email, not a public call-out on news and DA journals they may not even see) giving information and clearly explaining what the extent of the issue would have done loads more than two sentences demanding 'where is my third option'.
ran long 1/2
---
And here is where I get myself in trouble.
I've got... mixed feelings about the DA kerfluffle yesterday. I hang out in the women-and-LGBT-dominated corners of the US comics fandom, so I am uncomfortably well-informed about many things like the non-gender issue. I respect the opinions, but I think sometimes folk take it
too farto extremes as well. There are mutually respectful ways to get things done, and then there is trollery, willful ignorance, screaming matches, dismissing someone's entire opinion on grounds of assuming they are racist/ablist/sexist/etc regardless of if that is true, and etc.DA shouldn't have removed the non-gender option to begin with, but I think people deeply involved in the LGBT community forget that to people not so involved, it just didn't occur to them as an issue. It's not malice, it's ignorance, and polite discourse and information is the best way to fix things. Internet mobs is not.
As a code monkey, I get why they took out the "unspecified" that used to be there. It didn't matter to DA before. When they retooled the site for v7, they started incorporating the gender setting into how the information pages generated sentences (his/her). They also started using it to target the advertising. Sure, I'm a paid member, but the site lives based on ad revenue. Not enough of us pay to make up for the number that don't. Advertisers will pay more for targeted ads. It's worth it for DA to do that. Whomever coded the site probably honestly did not even know there are people that don't have a gender identity, and coded as they understand the world, as the marketers want and need the site to operate. For the sake of allowing customer/user privacy, they set it so that you could choose to hide your selected gender. Due diligence in their minds and level of information. Now, they overlooked that the info pages would still display he/she, but when you're re-coding a site that large things like that are not a priority. Making sure complex things like the gallery systems, layouts with various ad sizes, search options and etc are functioning properly, etc are the priority. Again, no one meant to offend, and they had a lot of problems with the galleries and image auto-resizing when v7 initially rolled out months ago. No one in the site admin even thought of this as a problem. A polite contact to the admin (I mean an email, not a public call-out on news and DA journals they may not even see) giving information and clearly explaining what the extent of the issue would have done loads more than two sentences demanding 'where is my third option'.