On Fri, 09 Jan 2009 11:17:22 PST Azalais Aranxta <[email protected]> wrote: > On Fri, 9 Jan 2009, Anna Simpson wrote: > > > > I just dislike cutesy or themed names in general, because they > > obscure meaning and they impose a non-neutral tone on a site. > > Drops and buckets and rainbows and whatever makes me think of a > > pink sparkly My Little Ponies themed site.
Yeah. If we're going to go twee, let's bite the bullet and call them "Sparkles". As in, "new user pix are 3 Sparkles each, new persona accounts are 25 Sparkles a year." Or not. > I like "points" just fine. I... have some reservations about "points", in that its already an overloaded term in various financial ways, and suggests it's not real money. We'd like to suggest to the IRS it's not real money but not to users. :) And the association with points in competitive games is also not what we want to encourage. But I could live with it. > I don't have to mentally > convert whatever cute name it is to "points" or "credits" which > is what we're really talking about. "Dollar credits". (Oh, hey, exchange rates are going to make this fun...) > "Wishes" is so twee. Any > "wish" you can buy for a dollar isn't much of a wish! Yeah, this. Am I the only person icked out by the idea of using the word "dream" to mean a form of *money*? I mean, I'm about to out myself to you all as a Filth Capitalist Pig (my business plans, let me show you them) and even *I* get the Ewwws from that. > > It's like the asylums etc at InsaneJournal. It's possible to > > work around the terms and ignore them, but I'd rather not have > > to. > > Yes. That's particularly problematic because it's offensive to > many people who are either mentally ill themselves or have > friends who are, and see it as a slur against them, Yes, and additionally: I work in the mental health field, and am pursuing independent licensure to practice. Do you have any idea how bad it could look for it to be discovered by potential employers or (heaven forfend) the licensure board that I was using a website which seemed to be mocking the mentally ill? Even if one thinks there's no slur intended or reasonable inferred, one can imagine how professionals in the field might see it differently and react accordingly. This is why I do not use IJ, and have reserved my name there so it can't be used by someone else pretending to me me. To bring this back to DWS, I suspect the general problem this illustrates is that making light of things -- and basing themes on making light of things -- in what is intended as a flexible, general-purpose platform for human interaction, is going to run afoul of those occasions when it is inappropriate to make light of those things. Humor is make humane by context; take it out of its context and... bad things happen. > I know a > lot of people love themes, but a lot of people don't, so we > probably will have a theme. But let's make it unobtrusive so > that we don't alienate as many people as we attract with it. Let's not give up. The site as a whole shouldn't have too much theme -- or maybe any -- so each user gets to determine her *own* theme. Isn't that the *L way? -- Siderea _______________________________________________ dw-discuss mailing list [email protected] http://lists.dwscoalition.org/cgi-bin/mailman/listinfo/dw-discuss
