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Honestly, I get why this isn't already a thing—it might clutter up the boards, especially if people decide to fill their profile bars with nonsense—but I think this would be a very positive change from an inclusivity point of view. Most boards I know, like GitP, already show a "Venus/Mars"-type symbol below the avatar. It helps cut back on confusion.
It would also be handy for the Recruitment subforum, since the GM is spared from having to open the profiles of PC applicants to see their basic information.
I'm against it, for just the reason you suggest: it leads to nonsense that the Customer Service team has to clean up. Especially if the archaic "race" is still being used.
Why not just the Gender tab, then? I am not sure what "nonsense" the Customer Service would need to clean up, but frankly, the lack of an in-thread gender/pronouns indicator is a weird relic that should've been addressed a long time ago. I only suggested making the bar global as an easy fix. It could be a temporary solution, if Paizo has plans to actually implement something more graceful later on, but I think it's better than forcing people to check profiles.
I should also state for the record that this is a somewhat personal matter for me, and not just an idle "hey, this would be cool". It's okay to disagree with me, but that's probably important context here. It is important to me that a feature along these lines is added, regardless of the fine details, and I think this is a good time for responses to be framed constructively—not simply, "No," but "No, but here's an alternative solution."
Instead of gender, I suggest a way to display your pronouns. That's far more useful to strangers trying to address you and interact with you from behind the keyboard.
Staff are already aware of this complication. See, for instance, the CS staff member whose 'name' includes 'she/her' because her given name is ambiguous as to gender.
This is also a good idea. I don't know how long it will take to implement, which is why I'm suggesting what is probably a quicker, cheaper "fix". Not to be cynical, but the Paizo forums have a small development team and major changes haven't historically been swift in coming.
The "Gender" bar could also simply be changed to "Gender and/or Pronouns". For instance, some women might go with "She/Her", some might go with "Female", some might go with "Female, She/Her". And some might enter something else, because the great thing about the bar for our purposes is you can enter whatever you feel like.
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Frankly, I find knowing someones 'gender' about as useful as knowing their 'race' when interacting with them on the internet. How is indicating your race/gender/species* useful to others in deciding how to treat you and interact with you?
It also puts people with fluid sexual identities in an awkward position by creating a social dynamic where they're supposed to pick a single label for themselves.
*1993 New Yorker cartoon
New Yorker, 04 Jul 1993
Steiner, Peter
The cartoon symbolizes the liberation of one's Internet presence from popular prejudices.
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As a trans girl, I would much rather people know. The gender tab doesn't have to be filled.
Race/"ancestry" has nothing to do with it. I was simply trying to clearly refer to the bar PBPs use. Or do you think I also wanted people to indicate their social class? :P
For you, indicating your pronouns isn't sufficient? It's important also to have a specific gender label in addition to that?
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I feel like I'm not being understood. This isn't about gender versus pronouns. I barely know what that debate would mean. I am suggesting that the Gender tab could be changed to a Gender/Pronouns tab and implemented so it appears forum-wide. Making the already operating bar forum-wide seemed like a logical route to doing so with minimal fuss.
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I'm honestly a little frustrated at how you seem to be stuck on the "gender vs. pronouns" issue, so to be clear: I would quite like for the Gender tab to be replaced with a Pronouns tab. I myself used it as one for a while, though the "She/Her Kobold Adept" didn't flow clearly on the main subforums I frequent, the Online Campaigns area.
If it were changed to "Gender/Pronouns", I wouldn't care. If it were changed to "Pronouns", I wouldn't care. If it were left the same, I wouldn't much care. I don't understand your focus on it, but yes, fine, changing it to "Pronouns" is fine. I didn't want to bog down this thread with, "Also, change the Gender tab to a Pronouns tab". It's not the point of my thread. I called it the Gender/Race/Class bar because that is what it currently is, and I am trying to be clear. If you want to start a "Rename the Race/Gender Tab on Profiles" thread, that's fine. But maybe take that somewhere else.
I'm really wary of asking the Paizo devs to simply add a "Pronouns" bar because I don't know how long that will take. Making the Gender/Ancestry/Class bar forum-wide would be a very quick change, I assume, and would serve very well as a temporary measure until a proper function is implemented.
So far, your complaint with making the Gender tab universal is that inclusivity or no, it simply creates too much clutter. Or is your sole issue that I called it a "Gender" tab and not a "Pronouns" tab?
I apologize if I seem annoyed right now. As I said, being able to clearly indicate that I am a girl is important to me. I have been known on these forums for a long time as a not-girl, to the extent that I felt pressured to create a coming-out thread simply to try to head off misgendering. My username and avatar do not clarify it, and I don't feel like I should be forced to switch to an alias with a different username or avatar simply to clarify things for other people. This is an important issue for me. I don't like it getting derailed into semantics, and that's what this feels like.
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What I'm trying to figure out is what performance spec you're trying to describe. Right now, you've created an engineering spec that tells the IT folks to rewrite the code for a specific part of the site so that it is toggled to 'on' for the entire site
Request: Make the "Gender / Class / Race" Profile Bar Forum-Global
The problem I think you're trying to solve is that the site locks in all avatar names after 10 posts. Because of that, there is no way to edit your name, or to add any personal description to your postings. The current work around is to create a new alias that includes the descriptive wording.
The UX I think you're asking for is a permanently editable text field that displays near the profile name/alias that is visible across the whole site for each name/alias.
Contributor
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I would love to have the Gender / Class / Race bars global, and support this initiative. I think that Kobold Cleaver had a great idea here.
I am also in support of changing the Gender tab to 'Gender/Pronouns' or Race to 'Ancestry'. The tabs are optional, and people can do with them what they want. The fields can contain quotes, PBP character stats, pronouns, new names or what have you.
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My personal opinions of this subject are largely irrelevant since we're talking about an application across the entire community, but I'm okay with this idea as long as its not mandatory. Those who are not comfortable labeling themself or simply don't want to, should be able to abstain and those tags simply would not appear on their avatar.
Paizo is considered a progressive company that is in touch with these topics so I'm fairly confident they could create a system of options than would be both appropriate and varied enough to meet most needs and the willingness to update or add options as time passes and labels change. That would be much more likely to happen than form-fillable fields that they would need to moderate from time to time.
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What I'm trying to figure out is what performance spec you're trying to describe. Right now, you've created an engineering spec that tells the IT folks to rewrite the code for a specific part of the site so that it is toggled to 'on' for the entire site
Request: Make the "Gender / Class / Race" Profile Bar Forum-GlobalThe problem I think you're trying to solve is that the site locks in all avatar names after 10 posts. Because of that, there is no way to edit your name, or to add any personal description to your postings. The current work around is to create a new alias that includes the descriptive wording.
The UX I think you're asking for is a permanently editable text field that displays near the profile name/alias that is visible across the whole site for each name/alias.
Here’s the story I think KC is after:
“As a user who posts on the Paizo forums, I would like my preferred pronouns to be displayed prominently in my posts so that other users interacting with me use the correct pronouns.”
KC suggested what appears to be a straightforward way of accomplishing this given the forum’s glacial page of development. It’s not an optimal way, but it in theory may be easier for the tech team to do than roll out a dedicated feature for that purpose.
Then there was a second story in the request specific to recruitment threads:
“As a play-by-post GM, I would like the race/ancestry, class, and gender of characters applying in the Recruitment thread displayed as part of their posts so that I don’t need to click into their alias profile to view that information while evaluating the applications.”
This story seems like something else that would fall out of doing the requested tech change above rather than the main focus of this thread, however.
(Side note, I support the main ask of making preferred pronouns exposed in some way/shape/form. I would also echo that it be optional so that those not comfortable providing that information need not do so)
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I got very cranky when I first posted this thread because I didn't realize how I might be misinterpreted. I'm sorry about that, CrystalSeas! It was pretty uncool of me. I was having a bad month, but that's no excuse.
Anyways, I want to bump this with a clarification: I would honestly just love to have a small editable field next to everyone's name throughout the forums, large enough for simple pronoun pins, in the style of what you see used in the Forum Games subforums.
I still think that making the Race/Class/Gender bar global is the easiest way to do this in the short-term, but it's far from the most graceful. I would just really like a way to indicate pronouns if I so choose.
(Obviously, it wouldn't be "forced" as some have implied--nobody's ever forcing you to fill those fields in, they're just an option.)
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In case people are missing the point - being able to clearly display pronouns prevents the assumption of people on the internet that everyone is a cis man from leading to people being misgendered.
I specifically chose a username with stereotypical feminine overtones (tender) and a female presenting avatar because I don't want to be referred to as "he/him" because that is traumatic for me as a trans person.
Kobold in another thread has been considering changing her username and avatar to signal her gender identity for the same reasons.
The internet is still in an unfortunate state where the default assumption is maleness, so you can't have a gender neutral username (like kobold cleaver or Sam or toaster oven) without people assuming you are male.
It would be nice if we could display pronouns beneath our names or beneath our avatar so that we don't have to have princess or ette or unicorn in our names to be addressed correctly.
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*gestures vaguely at Tender's whole post* Exactly what she said.
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In case people are missing the point - being able to clearly display pronouns prevents the assumption of people on the internet that everyone is a cis man from leading to people being misgendered.
Makes things much more clear to me, and as much as that helps anyone, I am all for it.
Have to admit that I misread KC's last sentence in the OP. Because as a GM basic information to me is Ancestry-Background-Class. As far as Sex/Gender is concerned, you can pretty much be whatever you want in my games, but it also won't influence gameplay in my games that much so it isn't really relevant to me.
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I do consider gender in some Recruitments, like if I want an even split, or if the players seem down to roleplay relationships and have specific genders their character would be interested in. But yeah, my OP was really misleading. I erred on the side of "keep it short" because I wanted to emphasize how simple this change could be.
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I do consider gender in some Recruitments, like if I want an even split, or if the players seem down to roleplay relationships and have specific genders their character would be interested in. But yeah, my OP was really misleading. I erred on the side of "keep it short" because I wanted to emphasize how simple this change could be.
I can understand that, and just that I have no use for it doesn't mean that it isn't a good idea in general. :)
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As long as filling in these things is optional, I am all in favor of them. But I would protest strongly if required to fill in any of them.
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You aren't required to do so on the Forum Games subforums, so I have no idea why it would be required anywhere else.
It would be incredibly useful to at least have a pronoun/gender (either or, rather than both with a /) field for optional user identification and clarification.
Software Architect
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This has had enough conversation and consistent interest that it's worth condensing down to a cogent feature request, at least. So I'd like to outline what I think such a feature request might look like, making a few presumptions (feel free to correct) and asking a few questions (feel free to weigh in) to try to put together a ticket that Tech and community management can at least discuss further.
Suppose we provide a text field permitting up to, say, 25 characters. I presume that would permit most users to specify their gender, sex, or their pronouns (or some combination) in most cases (e.g [male | he/they/him/them] = 23 chars, [woman | she/her] = 15 chars). I'm not going to pretend I can enumerate all the genders/pronouns we are likely to see, so I'm sure in some cases 25 characters might force someone to make choices about what they most want to display. But generally, a 25-character text field seems like a reasonable degree of accommodation to me.
Would this field be exclusively for gender/sex/pronouns, or would it be a more generic field that people could use for whatever they like (titles, taglines, slogans, etc)? The former arguably puts Paizo in the unenviable position of having to moderate who is earnestly sharing their gender information and who is trolling, while the latter arguably requires less curation but may weaken the usefulness of the field altogether.
We could have this text field be configurable per user or per alias. Per-user would be much simpler to implement and use - set it once on your account. Per-alias would be more work, but would more easily support gender for play-by-post characters, genderfluid people with differently-gendered aliases, or other contexts where aliases are more than mere alts. It could also be possible to set an alias to inherit the user's gender, so a user could set their personal gender and have it automatically apply to all their aliases (unless a given alias has been configured with a blank gender or a custom gender). Obviously the last option is the most flexible, but it's a much bigger task to implement and test properly, and would be more complicated and less intuitive to use.
Would forum posts reflect subsequent changes to the gender field? Typically, Paizo's forums will snapshot an alias's information when a post is made, so that in the future you can see what someone's alias was or what their subscriber, contributor, or staff status were, even if those have since changed. Keeping this behavior for gender would be consistent with that approach, but would also leave out-of-date gender information attached to posts, which would create permanent records misgendering community members or even outing them.
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My very humble take :
1 (field content). The first option seems better. TBH I do not see how it could be used for trolling. And the second option actually seems far more open to trolling.
2 (user vs alias). The mere reading of your post was enough for me to go per alias for all the very good reasons you mention. Third option would be merely Nice to have, rather than Must have. So option 2 it is for me.
3 (relevance of info). No misgendering, please. The avatar changes on all posts IIRC. Please have the Gender info do the same so that it is always relevant to the alias' current info. Doing otherwise is bond to create a nightmare of accidental misgendering IMO.
Thanks a lot for the value you and your team add for us customers. It is people like you who make Paizo successful.
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Brian,
Thank you for indicating the benefits and potential pitfalls of each option. If there was some way to implement 2 (User vs. Alias) with a capability to expand to 3 if the coding could be adjusted to prevent misgendering via future-proofing that'd be ideal, but 2 seems like the best option out of the three presented at the moment.
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Raven, I think the fear with trolling is that since it will be a text input rather than a drop-down select (which to be clear text input is better because it allows for exact expression), you'll have a contingent of edgelords who only know one joke that put something like "assault helicopter" as their gender.
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Raven, I think the fear with trolling is that since it will be a text input rather than a drop-down select (which to be clear text input is better because it allows for exact expression), you'll have a contingent of edgelords who only know one joke that put something like "assault helicopter" as their gender.
I had not considered that it could be text input, my bad.
Thank you for the clarification, Cori Marie.
I reverse my answer to 1. then : 2nd option.
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The plus side to people putting "attack helicopter" as their gender is that it's a big neon sign for people to avoid them and mods to get the disciplinaries goin'.
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The plus side to people putting "attack helicopter" as their gender is that it's a big neon sign for people to avoid them and mods to get the disciplinaries goin'.The second part puts more workload on the mods' everfull platter though.
In some ways, early identification of bad actors can reduce mod workload, rather than increase it. It seems like it would be difficult to fit subtle harassment into 25 characters. Admittedly, it's possible that that's just a failure of imagination on my part.
Now, you wouldn't want such things hanging around after the malefactors were caught and dealt with, but "permanently banned" fits into a 25-character field just fine, and would neatly provide for a second request that I've seen (and support), with what I would think was relatively little additional effort. (Would just require changing the "permanent ban" function to also automatically change that field, and then prevent further changes it while the person in question was banned.)
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Thanks for looking into this Brian!
I haven't really thought through all the implications, but my initial idea is to have a field tied to the account that would be labeled "pronouns:" and offer 25 characters. This would be set to display along with username and portrait (although it could be left blank). Ideally, it would be similar to the portrait, in the sense that when you change it, it changes every post you made with the account.
As for aliases, I feel like this is less relevant (but that may be more how I use aliases). Ideally, aliases would have the same options as the prime account, although I strongly lean against any information from the prime account auto-filling aliases.
Note: Wow! Used to do this kind of stuff many years ago with CSS, XML, etc., but after many years away from it all, I'm as rusty as a commoners dagger!
EDIT: Love your portrait by the way!
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Thanks for looking into this Brian!
I haven't really thought through all the implications, but my initial idea is to have a field tied to the account that would be labeled "pronouns:" and offer 25 characters. This would be set to display along with username and portrait (although it could be left blank. Ideally, it would be similar to the portrait, in the sense that when you change it, it changes every post you made with the account.
As for aliases, I feel like this is less relevant (but that may be more how I use aliases). Ideally, aliases would have the same options as the prime account, although I strongly lean against any information from the prime account auto-filling aliases.
Auto-filling might be okay. It definitely would need to be changeable, at least for character aliases, which I don't think are mechanically distinguished from other aliases.
Seems to me the simplest approach would be piggy back on the existing code for the fields displayed in the play by post sections and allow the new (Or just renamed?) field to be visible everywhere, but I don't know what the code looks like, so that might not be as easy as it sounds. (It never is.)
Abuse of the field should be forbidden and strictly enforced. Possibly extending to any use of it for non gender/pronoun purposes, just to keep things simple.
Also, there should be a smurf option.:)
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Auto-filling might be okay.
I thought I recall some issue popping up related to auto-filling of fields for aliases? Perhaps that was auto filling from account info or something?
Also, quick question for Brian or anyone else in the know:
Does each edit of a post get stored and displayed to the mods separately? I often do a bunch of edits to a post for spelling, punctuation, etc? I hope the mods don't have to see the dozen different versions of each post where I chase after un-dotted "i"s and un-crossed "t"s!
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I would welcome a pronouns bar, written by the user. I worry that having it open to other info opens us up to trolling, but it’s hard to do too much evil with just pronouns.
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In some ways, early identification of bad actors can reduce mod workload, rather than increase it. It seems like it would be difficult to fit subtle harassment into 25 characters. Admittedly, it's possible that that's just a failure of imagination on my part.
I agree with this. If someone thinks transphobic jokes are funny, I honestly want the moderators to warn them about it sooner rather than later.
Brian, thanks very much for your response. I want to respond carefully, since you put a lot more eloquence into your post than I did in my OP.
This has had enough conversation and consistent interest that it's worth condensing down to a cogent feature request, at least. So I'd like to outline what I think such a feature request might look like, making a few presumptions (feel free to correct) and asking a few questions (feel free to weigh in) to try to put together a ticket that Tech and community management can at least discuss further.
Suppose we provide a text field permitting up to, say, 25 characters. I presume that would permit most users to specify their gender, sex, or their pronouns (or some combination) in most cases (e.g [male | he/they/him/them] = 23 chars, [woman | she/her] = 15 chars). I'm not going to pretend I can enumerate all the genders/pronouns we are likely to see, so I'm sure in some cases 25 characters might force someone to make choices about what they most want to display. But generally, a 25-character text field seems like a reasonable degree of accommodation to me.
This sounds wonderful.
Would this field be exclusively for gender/sex/pronouns, or would it be a more generic field that people could use for whatever they like (titles, taglines, slogans, etc)? The former arguably puts Paizo in the unenviable position of having to moderate who is earnestly sharing their gender information and who is trolling, while the latter arguably requires less curation but may weaken the usefulness of the field altogether.
I would strongly favor a text box over a dropdown menu.
I understand the concerns about trolling, but I fundamentally think that if we design the site around the behavior of the trolls, at the expense of the site being more accessible to trans people, we're just giving the trolls what they want.
She/her
They/them
It/its
They/she
He/they*
She/they/he*
She/it*
Ze/zir
Xe/xir
Fae/faer
She/fae/byte/it*
Any pronouns
This isn't even getting into plural systems (people with multiple personalities) or people still experimenting who shift between, or genderfluid people. I personally find it all really remarkable and cool how people seek to express their relationship with gender and identity, even if I've been pretty content with she/her ever since I started using them. No dropdown menu can possibly be expected to accommodate all this.
*Used to indicate both/all pronouns listed are okay, but often the first pronoun listed is loosely preferred.
We could have this text field be configurable per user or per alias.
I very much like it being configurable per-alias, but I suppose it's not critical. It would be quite nice for plural systems, as well. Yes, I vote "per-alias".
I'd lean away from "default user pronouns" for aliases, just because it's more work and not that much additional benefit.
Would forum posts reflect subsequent changes to the gender field? Typically, Paizo's forums will snapshot an alias's information when a post is made, so that in the future you can see what someone's alias was or what their subscriber, contributor, or staff status were, even if those have since changed. Keeping this behavior for gender would be consistent with that approach, but would also leave out-of-date gender information attached to posts, which would create permanent records misgendering community members or even outing them.
This confuses me a little bit, because it's not how Play-By-Post aliases work (which actually makes browsing old PbPs a bit of a pain in the neck, since I can't see, say, the HP a character was at in a fight from a year ago). I would much rather it be like that--no snapshot, just a steady constant.
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Organized Play Coordinator
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For what it's worth, over the two years we've had the Paizo Events server, I have had my pronouns in my nickname and encouraged others, especially our HQ staff, to do the same.
I am unaware of a single user ever treating that area as a joke. I recognize that it's not quite the same as a dedicated pronoun field, but it's a data point at least.
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Also, quick question for Brian or anyone else in the know:
Does each edit of a post get stored and displayed to the mods separately? I often do a bunch of edits to a post for spelling, punctuation, etc? I hope the mods don't have to see the dozen different versions of each post where I chase after un-dotted "i"s and un-crossed "t"s!
Compulsive self-editing (as I refer to my own habit) does not inconvenience the mods in any way.
I would strongly favor a text box over a dropdown menu.
I want to be clear that at no point have I entertained the idea of a dropdown for this field. There is no way for Paizo to adequately curate a list of valid gender identities; that's entirely a non-starter. Whether the field is exclusively for gender or not is more of a policy question with implications for what sort of content is acceptable and what sort of moderation/enforcement would be required.
Someone smarmily blurting out "I identify as an Attack Helicopter" while snickering is pretty clear-cut. But, as I understand it, the space of gender expression is broad to the point of limitless, so there must exist a grey area in which the goal of taking people at their word regarding their gender identity and the goal of not permitting mockery on the forums will come into tension. I would like to hope that our community membership is of high enough quality that said grey area will remain unoccupied, but part of good design is considering edge cases of all sorts.
Is a gender field feature worth having on the whole even if some borderline (wherever that is) trolling gets past moderation? Quite possibly, but it's a question to consider carefully. I wouldn't want to make an update to the forums intended to bring people joy only to find that we'd botched the implementation.
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I think the benefits outweigh the drawbacks. Most of the trolls will be easily identified, while legitimate uses will prevent people from assuming gender of trans or other gender non-conforming folk on the site, and takes away the "How was I supposed to know" argument we've seen be made in bad faith over the last few months.
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My characters in Play by Post can reveal their gender identity.
I as a forum user cannot currently.
To weigh the concerns carefully is important, and should not be discounted.
However, if my characters can identify their gender and I cannot as a user, that seems almost backwards..
Please note, that's not a request to get rid of it for characters, but rather to expand it as indicated in the OP.
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I'd like to see it so I can put They/Them and identify myself in more spaces I'm a part of.
I wouldn't be shocked to see it used humorously, and half expect some forums users will do so without any desire to mock it at all, which will have the side effect of diluting attempts to do so that aren't overt enough for moderation action, making their attempt to make other forums users uncomfortable fall flat.
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I think mods should not have to check the content of the line by themselves, especially if it can be changed (as it should obviously).
So, if we see an abuse of the line for a given alias, we just email the mods about it, as we do when we see hating posts and the like.
Abuse of the gender line could become a new Flag category, but I fear trolls would joyfully use that against other posters.