Every time I think LJ-bosses can't piss me off more...

[branchandroot]

...they say something like this.

In reply to my email objecting to the pending required-gender-binary thing:

thank you for your feedback.
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. I am sorry that you were misinformed.

Best regards,

To which I could only reply:

I am very pleased to see that you have rolled back that code. However, please note, I never thought that it was *already* live. Instead, upon being alerted, I examined the changelog account, and the code in question, for myself and determined that, indeed, that code, which was *already in the repository* and waiting only on the next code push to go live, would do the things I was warned it would.

I am afraid that disingenuous comments about my being "misinformed" only make me more suspicious of LJ's original intentions. I do not appreciate the implication that I do not know what I am talking about, nor such a reinterpretation of my own original message, nor the veiled accusation that Denise was lying. She was not. The repository is not a beta test site, and none of the changes I objected to could have been made by mistake. Please do not continue to misrepresent events to users who may be less familiar with code and the LJ file structure.

Honestly, how low can you get? Well, about that low, I guess.

Comments

[mitsuhachi]

You know, as a non-coder, I actually bought what they said? I'm double pissed at being lied to now.... and I kind of hope that you do reply that way.

[branchandroot]

Oh, I did. And, yeah, code can have unforseen consequences, but what that usually means? Is that it just breaks something. The male-female limit could /not/ have been a mistake, not when the code said (in plain language) "this field must be filled with something that begins with M or ends with F". Now, that's a screwy-ass way to get the effect, but there's no ambiguity; it's an either-or statement and contains no place for a third option.

I'm glad to agree that the whole /idea/ was a mistake, and just possibly that there was a miscommunication about what the code was supposed to do in the first place. But neither the m-f binary nor the "you must do this or else get this error message" section was an unintended consequence, that's for damn sure.

[dragonscrawl]

You know, I don't think they'd get the results they may or may not have wanted anyway thanks to that whole "ends with F" thing.

[branchandroot]

I think it would have worked, since it was either/or. But it did give me a horrible desire to (had this gone live) find someone to hack into LJ and add to the dropdown list of gender options such things as "marmot" and "elf".

[dragonscrawl]

But "Female" neither starts with M nor ends with F. So even with the binary male/female, I can't see how female would have been an acceptable result. I admit to a lack of understanding for code, though, so I might be missing something there.

[branchandroot]

Oh, I see! No, what would end up in the field (in the database itself) would just be M or F. The actual words "male" and "female" only appear in the interface dropdown and don't come into this part. Which is why the "start or end" matching string is such a bizarre way of coding that. I mean, "if not M or F" seems so much more straightforward.

[dragonscrawl]

*nods* Okay, that'd be the bit I was missing then.

[zarhooie]

The error message was too pretty for it to be a mistake.

[branchandroot]

Seriously. When you have written in all the logic and content for error messages, and not generic ones!, claiming that it was a mistake just /doesn't/ wash.

[dragonwolf]

I thought the code looked a little...not mistake-like, but there was a "specify" thing that I thought might have been the unspecified option (I'm not versed in Perl), so I didn't think much of the response. Looking at it the way you have changes things a bit, though.

[branchandroot]

*wry* I'm not the very best at reading Perl either, but the "specify" looked to me like the thing that comes at the top of the dropdown. Like "Gender: [Specify | Male | Female]". Because the value that is paired with "specify" further down is "".

[dragonwolf]

Shows how much attention I paid to the code itself. Like someone else said, "I looked at the LJ code and my eyes glossed over."