Shienvien

Mahz's Dev Journal

There is sex (body type - male, female, intersex, hermaphrodite, sexless/nondistinct), there is gender (identity and/or brain structure - man, woman, bigender, agender, genderless, fluid, queer, demi, gray, attack helicopter, ...), and it's occasionally important to make clear which you're speaking of. Transpeople are what happens when sex and gender clash.
Sexual orientation is a different matter and hasn't thus far been addressed, as far as I'm aware.

I would like to point out that since the system used is a symbol system (meaning it uses symbols instead of words), that custom options aren't possible (or is at the very least more difficult).

The site doesn't care whether it's a word or a tiny image. The worst it'd do is break the outlay a bit for long-usernamed people by being a bit longer itself - just move it under the user title or into the info section below, problem solved.

Mahz's Dev Journal

As time progresses, there is no way to tell what other options people will create, so it is much more beneficial to the peace of the community to offer absolute choice, the ability to add any label they prefer, or the removal of all choice/refusal to offer anything more than what is given. For this reason (and to avoid further conflict), it would be best to simply offer the user a query to add any title they would like.

That's a fairly eloquent way of saying what I've being trying to convey.

Let all the "nonbinary" genders be whatever they are, let me be oddly pedantic and mark my gender as "woman" rather than my sex, since those are different things and putting my sex where it says "gender" doesn't really make sense to me (I'm also a programmer, but that isn't my gender, either).

Mahz's Dev Journal

Making a custom field would be no harder than giving us all user titles. Mahz implemented those on the same day those were brought up. Chances are it's pretty much just copy-paste, and it's a single-time effort in any case.
There is no functional reason that I can think of here and now why not to give users that tiny bit of additional customization, rather than having them clutter their bio/status/user title with info most others have elsewhere. Especially if their bio happens to be huge and majority of individuals who glance at their profile might not read it. And so on and so forth. I've also seen plenty of people who do, indeed, consider "other"-option alienating.
So in the end, why argue against a pencil-in option? Sometimes, "But why not?" is the most telling question of them all. Since I can't think of any objective reasons, why not just give users 128 letters to say whatever they are in their own terminology and call it a day?

Mahz's Dev Journal

I sometimes raise points in regards to things I've seen escalate into full-blown fights in the past, and refer to arguments seen therein rather than my own particular opinions (agender people can be just as "unchill" as any other group that feels they've been alienated, I can tell you that much ... there certainly are individuals who want it to be abundantly clear they're neither, and then there are those who say these who are strictly neither are genderless rather than agender, and...).
Generally, I've also thought about the matter long enough to try and offer some kind of solution that seems most reasonable or logical to me. You can't appeal to everyone, but if there is a very easy way to be close to all-inclusive without generating clutter, then why not be so? My general principle is "let user do whatever they want (as long as it doesn't break the law or roll over others), force them to do as little as possible".
Not that I cannot be nitpicky on my own behalf every now and then - I tend to be rather particular about my language here and there, for instance, and if something just happens to be one of those colors that'll hurt my eyes, I'll probably point that out, too.

And no, I don't have a "tone of questioning"... Unless I'm joking, all text of mine should be read deadpan. (And people often have a hard time telling if I'm joking.) I'm also tired, which doesn't exactly help my, eh, self-comprehension? (Addendum: I also don't imply things. If I actually thought something, it'd be spelled out in no uncertain terms.)

Mahz's Dev Journal

There are a whole bunch of other genders (why'd you include those, but not, say, agender, which I've seen far more commonly than "third gender"? Etc, etc.), and I personally still use female/male as strictly sex (so phenotype, not identity), and never to denote gender. A pencil-in option avoids effectively all such potential conflicts of interest.

Mahz's Dev Journal

My point was more along the lines that chromosomes are not what define sex. (As XY females do have one of the chromosomal sets you described, but aren't the "expected" sex for that set.) Biological sex is determined by the structure of the, eh, "end product". (It's also debatable whether chromosomal abnormalities like XYY (male), X_ (Turing, female), XXY (male) are mutations in the strictest sense - also note how all of those generally end up with one of the two "main" sexes, rather than intersex/nondefined variants ... of those, XYY has practically no effect whatsoever, save for slightly greater average height.)

Mahz's Dev Journal

There are XY females, and they're not extremely rare, as far as mutations go (only two genes in the Y chromosome need to be mutated for that to occur). Sex is generally determined by phenotype, rather than karyotype.

/Random factoid time.

Bot Reporting 2.0

I'm pretty certain this one's a bot: roleplayerguild.com/users/vive123654

Mahz's Dev Journal

CPU hitting 100% is actually a very general issue that could be caused by whatever, from an infinite loop to a program that's simply too demanding for the system. You can pull it off with pretty much literally any system.

(It's a symptom, not a cause.)

Mahz's Dev Journal

Some script can do it, chances are. Can't say much without knowing what servers those are and how you access them.