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How do you change a member's gender?

LeftBrainLeftBrain ✭✭
edited May 2011 in Vanilla 2.0 - 2.8
When I imported my Vanilla 1 to Vanilla 2, all the existing members were made Male by default. How can I change male designations to females? Is there a simple field in the database I can change?

Comments

  • Through the database (GDN_User table).

    This gender stuff really needs to be switchable, so it can be turned off for individual users or globally. It is a big pain when authenticating users against external systems that have not captured gender information at all.
  • Perfect. Thanks. I was able to make the change. What happened was that one of my users wanted to change their gender (default is male) and they were not able to because their username had a space in it so the place where you could normally change it wouldn't allow it.

    I guess Vanilla 1 let you have spaces in user names but Vanilla 2 doesn't.
  • judgejjudgej
    edited May 2011
    Ah, it's good to know that. My users have spaces too. TBH the use of spaces is a bit of a mess - in some places (e.g. ProxyConnect) it is allowed, and in other places (some front-end validation) it is not.

    This is worth raising as a bug, so it is highlighted at least until a decision is made on the allowed format of names (I would vote to support spaces throughout, but allow it to be turned off for people who insist they don't want it). I think that would actually be quite a minor thing to implement.
  • "This is worth raising as a bug"

    Good idea. Is there something specific that has to be done to do this?

  • lucluc ✭✭
    edited May 2011
    It seems normal that is allowed in Proxyconnect, as it's to get users from outside of vanilla.

    Having spaces breaks many things, just like mention for instance, it's major headache to have it working everywhere. Where does the username stops and where the actual text begins?

    just like: @Left Brain <- there no mention!
  • judgejjudgej
    edited May 2011
    @Left+Brain works for me, after a one-line change in my production Vanilla. There are not many places that need fixes to support spaces consistently across the application. Even without the "+", @LeftBrain could be made to work with a little more thought put into looking up the username. Until there is a unified approach to this, development will diverge and more space-related incompatibilities will be developed by different developers.

    As for a "major headache", I would say no, it's not. Do the right encoding and decoding in *the right place* and it is pretty much something that just works.

    My main point on this is that usernames and display names have been combined in Vanilla, an idea copied from other services such as Facebook. This is fine in a standalone new and independent service, but Vanilla is designed to very much work with other systems, and so it cannot be so rigid with its rules.

    I would still argue strongly that spaces *can* be supported, and in a way that people who do not want to support it can switch it off. There is room for both without any compromises.
  • lucluc ✭✭
    And if you have a user LeftBrain and one Left Brain?
    What if you integrate a system where Left+Brain is a valid username as well?
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