{"id":441,"date":"2008-04-22T21:18:56","date_gmt":"2008-04-23T01:18:56","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/www.sarahdopp.com\/blog\/?p=441"},"modified":"2008-04-22T21:23:58","modified_gmt":"2008-04-23T01:23:58","slug":"engagecom-is-neither-bi-phobic-nor-lazy-theyre-just-really-busy-and-use-slow-servers","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/sarahdopp.com\/blog\/2008\/engagecom-is-neither-bi-phobic-nor-lazy-theyre-just-really-busy-and-use-slow-servers\/","title":{"rendered":"Engage.com is neither bi-phobic nor lazy.  (They&#8217;re just really busy and use slow servers.)"},"content":{"rendered":"<div class=\"juiz-outdated-message jodpm-top\">Heads up, this content is 18 years old. Please keep its age in mind while reading.<\/div><p><a href=\"http:\/\/www.sarahdopp.com\/blog\/?p=436\"><img decoding=\"async\" src=\"http:\/\/www.sarahdopp.com\/blog\/wp-content\/uploads\/2008\/04\/sarah-on-engage2.jpg\" alt=\"sarah-on-engage2.jpg\" align=\"right\" border=\"0\" hspace=\"5\" vspace=\"5\" \/><\/a><a href=\"http:\/\/www.sarahdopp.com\/blog\/?p=436\">As promised<\/a>, I hit the <a href=\"http:\/\/www.engage.com\">Engage.com<\/a>-sponsored Love 2.0 party last night and asserted my peaceful protests about their website&#8217;s rigid category structure.  I met the CEO, the Project Manager, the Front End Developer, and the Art Director.  They were all very friendly and tolerant toward the tall queer trouble-maker in the black wig, and I was impressed with how amenable they were to my concerns about their dating service.<\/p>\n<p>The question was: <strong>Why can&#8217;t I be bisexual on your website?  <\/strong><\/p>\n<p>The answers were along these lines (with my reactions in italics)&#8230;<\/p>\n<ul>\n<li>That was <strong>a database decision<\/strong>.  We made it possible for you to be straight or gay, but bisexuality requires searching the entire database, and that&#8217;s a big load on the servers.\n<ul>\n<li><em>Good news! Enterprise-level databases and servers are capable of handling full searches now!  Really&#8230;<\/em><\/li>\n<\/ul>\n<\/li>\n<li>You can! You&#8217;re free to <strong>switch back and forth<\/strong>!  You can be one way one week and another the next!\n<ul>\n<li><em>That&#8217;s great that you allow people to be fluid about their identities (really, that&#8217;s important, and i&#8217;m glad you&#8217;re doing it).  But I&#8217;m not excited about dividing my time into &#8220;straight weeks&#8221; and &#8220;gay weeks.&#8221;  I want to represent myself on your site consistently and honestly, and not have to make a decision on which group of people is allowed to court me at a time.<\/em><\/li>\n<\/ul>\n<\/li>\n<li>We thought about it, and we&#8217;d still like to do it, but it&#8217;s just going to require <strong>so much code<\/strong> to make it work.  It&#8217;s very complicated.\n<ul>\n<li><em>I hear ya.  It&#8217;s hard.  That&#8217;s rough.  I believe in you, though.  You can do w<\/em><em>hatever you want to do.  You have the tools.<\/em><\/li>\n<\/ul>\n<\/li>\n<li>It&#8217;s a matter of <strong>release dates and product management<\/strong>.  We&#8217;ve got so much going on, and we&#8217;re working on making the site better all the time.  We just haven&#8217;t been able to get that piece in place.\n<ul>\n<li><em>I totally understand. I&#8217;m a project manager myself.  I know this stuff gets messy.  You can&#8217;t get it all done at once.  So&#8230; are you working on it?<br \/>\n<\/em><\/li>\n<\/ul>\n<\/li>\n<li>I agree, it&#8217;s important, and we want to be the kind of site that welcomes everybody.  We should have that done <strong>by the end of the year<\/strong>, and we hope you&#8217;ll come back when the site is more open.\n<ul>\n<li><em>Fantastic!  Thanks!  I&#8217;ll keep an eye out for the changes!  It&#8217;s been great talking to you.  I look forward to becoming your biggest fan.<br \/>\n<\/em><\/li>\n<\/ul>\n<\/li>\n<\/ul>\n<p><a href=\"http:\/\/www.engage.com\"><img decoding=\"async\" src=\"http:\/\/www.sarahdopp.com\/blog\/wp-content\/uploads\/2008\/04\/engage-1.jpg\" alt=\"engage-1.jpg\" align=\"right\" border=\"0\" hspace=\"5\" vspace=\"5\" \/><\/a>Seriously, they&#8217;ve been really good about this.  I&#8217;ve had several follow up email exchanges with the people I met at the party, scheming what an ideal site could function like, and discussing the pros and cons of organizational styles.  Their VP also responded to my original email, stating she agrees with my point and that they would do their best to get it right.<\/p>\n<p>I&#8217;m excited about Engage because they&#8217;re merging new ideas about connections with models people are already comfortable with.  By the way they&#8217;ve responded to my noise, I can tell they sincerely care about making their community happy.  They&#8217;ve just got some growing to do.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"<p>Heads up, this content is 18 years old. Please keep its age in mind while reading.As promised, I hit the Engage.com-sponsored Love 2.0 party last night and asserted my peaceful protests about their website&#8217;s rigid category structure. I met the CEO, the Project Manager, the Front End Developer, and the Art Director. They were all [&hellip;]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[47,167,70,32,46],"tags":[170,101,169,168],"class_list":["post-441","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-san_francisco_culture","category-sarahs-soapbox","category-social-media","category-technology","category-web_20","tag-bisexuality","tag-customer-service","tag-dating-sites","tag-engagecom"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/sarahdopp.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/441","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/sarahdopp.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/sarahdopp.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/sarahdopp.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/sarahdopp.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=441"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/sarahdopp.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/441\/revisions"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/sarahdopp.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=441"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/sarahdopp.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=441"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/sarahdopp.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=441"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}