I noticed that most of the time I actually don’t really know, what pronouns people on here are using. I thus think it would be great if there were an option to display pronouns next to people’s names.
I don’t know how hard it would be to implement that. If adding pronouns in this way is not feasible, I think it would be a good idea to encourage people to add their pronouns to the “about me” section of their profiles.
Yes, seems like a good idea. I note that @ump has “Tech Officer” listed under their name when making posts, whereas nobody else (that I’ve noticed) has anything listed there even if they hold a role. I wonder if that line could be repurposed for this.
You may already do this by putting pronouns in you name or about me in the profile
But neither your name, nor your “about me” is displayed in posts.
Encouraging people to write their pronouns into their “about me”, is actually what I proposed in my post above, in case that it is not feasible to add a pronoun feature.
You rang?
After preliminary research, it’s complicated. (I know, “shock”.)
Discourse doesn’t seem to have the functionality to display “extra” fields in the posters’ by-line. It can be done with a plug-in, custom code, and custom themes, but I’m not sure that we have the necessary plug-in available for our hosted instance. We’re limited to the plug-ins that come out of the box. I’m still researching.
The Title field that’s mentioned? It’s “difficult” to update. Or rather only Mods and Admins have access to change anyone’s Title (users can’t change their own), which is why so few users have that set.
Another option is that I can make the Name field appear instead of the user-id. It’s (much) easier for users to update their name to include pronouns than to change user-id (or do the custom code I mention above), however…
Looking at a quick report of the existing users, many people have used their civil names and some folks left the field blank. I don’t want to inadvertently dox anyone by suddenly making that change. If it’s the best option, we’d need to discuss how to get there (notifications, chance to update, etc).
Meanwhile, when you include information in your About me panel (under your user profile), it shows up in your user card. A user just needs to click a person’s name to see their details. I could also add a new “Pronouns” custom user field that would work similarly to League Affiliation. Adding the new custom field would (should?) encourage users to include it, but I also wouldn’t want to make it hard-required.
Thoughts? Is a custom field on the users’ card sufficient? Should we look at switching to displaying Name instead of user-id? Other options we haven’t considered?
Thanks for your response!
A pronoun field would be an excellent solution to encourage people to mention their pronouns. While a separate field in the by-line would be ideal, I think that this would be a good solution as well.
I was actually wondering why this is not done anyway. When asked to choose a name in addition to a user name my intuitive assumption was that the name would be shown instead of the user name. I would thus be very much in favour of this change.
Or is there maybe an option of letting users decide which name they prefer to be shown? Like a check box, that would be automatically ticked for new users, but not for existing users? This would solve the problem you mentioned with people having stuff in their name field they may not be comfortable being shown in the by-line?
Honestly this might be better regardless of the eventual solution for pronouns. All of the email notifications already use the Name field which gets quite confusing when we turn don’t see those names actually on the forum itself. It also gives users greater control if they wish to change their name.
The field is labelled “Full Name (Optional)” which probably led to this result. Can it be relabelled just to “Name”?
This seems a good solution given the limitations. It puts the information only a click away, and would encourage users to add it.
I’ve added Pronouns as a new (optional) user field that will display on users’ cards.
I’ll talk to the team about possibly changing to display Name, but to the best of my current understanding, it’s not something that can be changed as a per-user option.