Damage control

[supergee]

There is no truth to the rumor that livejournal hired Michael "Heckuva job, Drownie" Brown to handle damage control; it just looks that way. It appeared for a while as if they were going to have mandatory two-choice gender listings on our user pages. That was either a dumb idea that they thought better of or a coding blunder that they fixed. The understandably negative replies to the original announcement are all over lj. The explanation from lj is not in news, as it should be, but available only in the replies to people who wrote to lj to complain. Here it is:

thank you for your feedback. This is all very informative, I received many email with this already.
However, the code update that you refer to is not live and did not have any chance to go live. That was a beta release, we always push code to beta to see if everything works correctly. In many cases it does not and we either fix bugs or pull the code from the final release plan.
We were going to add a gender field to the sign up user flow, which is fine, but by mistake it became a mandatory "female/male" field for everyone. This is why this is not going live. And this is what beta releases are for, to see problems and solve them before any user faces a problem.

I would appreciate if you share this information with your friends that are also concerned.

Best regards,
--
Anjelika Petrochenko
GM, LiveJournal US