CUNY Academic Commons

Adding a free-entry field to edit mode on user profiles and registration is easy to do. Deciding what to do with this information is more complex.

At minimum, we would likely want to show the information on the user's profile. The easiest place to slot the information is as another row alongside 'Follow Me Online', 'Contact', etc. See screenshot.

Displaying the information throughout the site is more complicated. Presumably the logic would be: if the user has provided pronouns, append them to the display name anywhere we create a user link throughout the site. But, as you suggest, this raises issues with length and consistency:
- We may want to impose a character limit
- We may want to do some sort of character sanitization and format normalization. If I enter "he his him", should it be changed to "he/his/him"? How about "he / his / him" (eliminate excess spaces)? How about "he-his-him" (standardize on the separating characters)? Think about, for example, the way that telephone number inputs work.
- Presumably we will also strip user-entered parentheses, so that when we introduce our own inline, we don't get duplicates. That is, "(he/his/him)" becomes "he/his/him", so that we can re-add the parens when we generate the user links.
- Good inline documentation when registering/editing will probably go a long way. Something like "Eg 'he/his/him', 'they/their/them'" might be enough to nudge users into using proper formatting.

As noted above, it's trivial to add a new field, and pretty easy to make it display as desired on the profile. So we might consider rolling out just this in the short term, and tackling the other issue (display throughout the site) separately. However, I think the impact would be much more if we dropped it all at once, as part of a release that would give us a platform for announcing the change.

(Also, just to show an example of where pronouns appear in the OpenLab, see attached screenshot.)

Thanks for chiming in, Elvis!

One question: Instead of adding the pronouns to the footer (near the social media icons), would it be possible to add them somewhere above the horizontal line that divides the page? For example, to the right or directly below the person's title.

Yeah, I was kinda thinking the same thing. The area containing the social media icons is mainly about contact info (URL, email, etc), but preferred pronouns is not a type of contact info. I've attached three 'profile' mockups that show a couple different ideas about where we might fit into user profiles.

In terms of adding the pronouns throughout the site, it might be good to consider the context of where they would then appear...and also to make a note about this, so users know that if they add pronouns, they will be pre-populated in various locations.

Yes, we definitely want to make it clear to users. I've mocked up a couple examples of where user names appear throughout the Commons, so you can see what it might look like to append pronouns to the user names. User names look different in different areas, and the easiest thing to do is to append pronouns in the same format throughout. But there are some cases where the specific formatting of the user name suggests alternative ways of displaying the pronouns "metadata", such as the case of group forums (that's my 'forum 2' mockup). Hopefully this is a good starting point for discussion about how/where to display the info.

Sonja, I've added you as a watcher in case you have thoughts about best practices. I don't want to bog you down with the minutiae of this task if you are bogged down with other tasks :-D

Thanks, Sonja! I will work up a first version for testing on cdev.

I've completed a first pass at this functionality. Some screenshots are attached, as is a brief gif that illustrates the client-side sanitization of user input. Some implementation notes and questions:

1. When editing, I placed the new field just below 'Full Name', near the top of the left-hand column. I called it 'Preferred Gender Pronouns' and gave it the following description: Separate with slashes. E.g. he/him/his, they/them/their. Feedback welcome on any of these decisions.

2. As noted above, I'm doing some sanitization and standardization of user input when editing the profile. Spaces are removed, hyphens and backslashes are changed to slashes, other non-alphanumeric characters are removed, parentheses/brackets are removed.

3. By using the WP filter get_the_author_display_name, I'm able to append the pronouns in most contexts. BuddyPress and bbPress both pass usernames through this filter. And many modern WordPress themes use some version of this function to display author metadata. However, my poking around has shown a few places on WP sites where the name shows up without pronouns. I want to be conservative about additional filtering of display names; the more places where I add the pronouns, the greater the danger of double-adding the pronouns, or causing other problems. As we test this feature, please take note of specific places where names are showing up without pronouns - including URLs, because it may be a theme-specific issue - and we can decide on a case-by-case basis whether it's prudent to fix.

Awesome - thanks to all for your feedback! I'll change the status so that we remember to include this in pre-release testing.

Hi All,

Just tested this and noticed that when I use dashes between pronouns, it autocorrects (correctly) to /slashes/ but if I just space between pronouns it autocorrects incorrectly to lumping all pronouns together. Maybe that's a bug? I think it would make more sense if spaces autocorrect to slashes the same way dashes do.

Video attached.