People, I've been meaning to ask this: I'm working on the Russian translation, and phrasing gets awkward in places because Slavic languages use gendered verbs (no, there's no neutral option aside from the one reserved for inanimate objects). For it to stop being awkward we'd need changes in the engine, adding some new templates specifically for languages with gendered verbs, AND we would need to be able to pick a gender in our profiles (with fallback on awkward phrasing with neutral). Thoughts?
@rkarabut How about using both verb forms as either "verb-suffixA/verb-suffixB" or "verb-suffixA/suffixB", the same way gendered nouns&adjectives are handled in German, French, Spanish, etc.
I don't think people will like to be forced into gender boxes just because some languages don't have neutral terms yet.
@Kimiko_0 Well that's how I did it for now, but you probably understand it doesn't look pretty. Again, read the original thread please. Nobody would be forced into anything, the default will stay neutral.
@rkarabut Ah, my apologies. I should've realized you'd already thought of that ^_^;
My vote still goes to keeping the userinfo part of the software gender-agnostic even if the language part can't always be.
@Kimiko_0 Well, my thinking is, lots of people already are including she/her or he/his in their profiles, why wouldn't they want to have a better mechanism for this anyway? Which, by the way, would implicitly indicate their preferred gender right when they are posting, helping to prevent mistakes.
@rkarabut Nah, that wouldn't work unless it's a free-form text field (there's just too many variations for anyone to enumerate them). And that wouldn't help your purpose.
@Kimiko_0 Just male/female/other would work fine, with 'other' as default, falling back on the slash thing. We can't accomodate anything else in Slavic languages anyway.
@rkarabut Just male/female/other would not be acceptable. Trying to force that would just result in many instances with that part patched out and you'd still have the same problem when you need to federate with them.
@Kimiko_0 They won't need to patch it out, it would be an admin option disabled by default - again, with gender falling back to neutral in this case. I think I mentioned it before.