LJ GenderFail Update

[marcmagus]

I awoke this morning to an email from the LiveJournal Community Care Team explaining that the changelog is beta code and that they would have fixed this before release:

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

Given hope, I went and checked out the changelog. True to their word, r16042 rolls back the commits associated with the gender field over the last few days.

Hopefully when this comes back it will retain an "Unspecified" field and add "Other".

Given that the first diff went in on 2009-12-10, I kind of wonder how long it would have taken before somebody inside LiveJournal had caught this and fixed it [and how they would have fixed it] had synecdochic not caught it and pointed it out.