Binary gender is an absolute deal-killer for my site
Howdy, all, I'm the administrator of a forum for LGBT and queer-friendly geek culture. This means that many of our members do not identify as binary genders (male or female), and many more (especially women) aren't exactly comfortable publishing their gender publicly because of the extreme misogyny and prejudice women face in gaming and IT. The mandatory gender selector is an absolute deal-breaker; we'd love to migrate from phpBB, but we can't expose our users to having to select a gender that doesn't describe them, or violate their own privacy.
Right now I have a test instance up where I've renamed "male" and "female" to "squid" and "zombie," but I'm concerned that there may still be pronouns hidden in the site which will refer to our users as "he." I guess I just wanted to say that this is great software, and having gender as a mandatory feature is a massive shame.
If anyone can confirm whether there are pronoun-using features in the site features somewhere (as some of the discussions I found from searching the board indicate), that would be great. If I can just change everyone to "they" it would be wonderful.
Comments
Welcome human !! Fortunately nothing is written in stone and you can actually default to undefined. I personally think it is unnecessary but some people do find it useful .
You can make it so undefined is the default. And remove them from view. I am sure there are several ways to achieve this and there is no need to move to the dreaded phpbb...
There are never pronouns added since the user name is always used as the identity.
If using quotes for example, the quote will repeat the author name and it will be like
Ellie said:
At no time is there a he or she unless it is predefined by the user.
This software is very flexible and you can do anything you dream up...well almost.
If you look at the class.entrycontroler.php line 1090
// Define gender dropdown options $this->GenderOptions = array( 'u' => T('Unspecified'), 'm' => T('Male'), 'f' => T('Female') );You can remove the options by commenting them out. Possibly the best way is through a plugin since it is not recommended to edit core files.
I do not think Vanilla cares what gender people are. There are plugins that do use the gender part . Some people want to force the gender selection so there is a plugin for that.
This is the best software you could pick for your community, I am sure about that.
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Cool. Yeah, I dug through the templates and found where the pronouns were - I'm not sure if I edited properly, but in any case the core software doesn't seem to actually use it.
I appreciate the feedback. I think we'll definitely be adopting the software.
Yes it is not used to define the author. It is just a standard thing that forms normally have. You can even hide it using css. Or like you did change the definition to something else.
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To prove that, there have been some people here that have called me sir ...
No one knows anyone's gender here for sure...
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Okay, so I found a place where my tweaks to pronouns don't seem to have worked - if a user changes their profile picture, the Activity page says "[user] changed [his/her] profile picture." What file are those pronouns in?
you should be changing definitions when possible not core files. for future changes.
$Definition['%1$s changed %6$s profile picture.'] = '%1$s cambió %6$s foto de perfil.';
please read this tutorial (you may need to read it a few times, but it will be worth it !)
http://vanillaforums.org/discussion/26597/tutorial-how-to-change-wording-how-to-change-text-how-to-change-language-how-to-change-locale
also check out the other tutorials - they are written for a purpose.
also if it is in the activity table already you may need to change it there if it doesn't change.
I may not provide the completed solution you might desire, but I do try to provide honest suggestions to help you solve your issue.
Or you can just remove it from the registration page altogether, then force it to "u", or anything else (even "m" would be ok, since it's not used anyway). That's how we dealt with it on our site, since gender is irrelevant to us (although calling it a "killer" or a "deal breaker" seems a bit excessive to me).
My shop | About Me
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I would change it to human on all of them ... or homo-sapiens ... or person . I must admit sometimes you do have to wonder what their gender is. Not that it matters.. but it is funny when you think someone is a certain gender and you are totally wrong.
For the longest time I thought 422 was a female.... also hbf lmao and Tama... don't ask me why. Turns out I am the only female here... I think..but we really aren't sure about the elusive duck-hawk because of his mythic status ...
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@vrijvlinder said:
plz, sir;
not to mention mysticscooby, pamela, sheila, mummypig, to name a few.
http://vanillaforums.org/discussion/comment/159846/#Comment_159846
http://vanillaforums.org/discussion/comment/159849/#Comment_159849
I may not provide the completed solution you might desire, but I do try to provide honest suggestions to help you solve your issue.
Ok, the only known active female... I have never seen them around
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Aha, that tutorial worked. Much appreciated. Thanks!
@SomethingEllie I believe the 2.1 revision goes a long way toward making this much easier. We've removed reliance on male/female gendering and made it so 'unspecified' is the default and the system doesn't care - you can hide all use of gender without issue. This is an issue I've given some thought to and we're definitely open to more feedback on improving this aspect of the product.
Thanks for this - going to be following up w/ my own site to address the site's gendered language.
That's much appreciated. Updating my site to 2.1 today.
The System may not care, but localization authors care, since knowing the gender is essential to creating a correct translation.
@Anonymoose We've made efforts to de-emphasize gender in translations where possible by doing things like eliminating pronoun use.
Unfortunately, that's not really realistic for languages that have endings for verbs based on the gender of the subject of the sentence. Once the gender of the user becomes unspecified, it becomes impossible to correctly form any sentence containing a verb refering to the action of the user. This occurs even when there are no pronouns in a sentence.
In some languages, using the plural is a way of avoiding this issue, however it may make the sentence sound odd. However, in a number of languages, even the plural form of verbs is gendered.