Maybe more people try to do this than you think, but they get the same message I just got when I tried:
*Lee Q., you do not have permission to access this page. This could be due to one of several reasons:
Your user account may not have sufficient privileges to access this page. Are you trying to edit someone else’s post, access administrative features or some other privileged system?
If you are trying to post, the administrator may have disabled your account, or it may be awaiting activation.*
As for your own picture, Nice tail. Who’s the guy holding up your pic?
Yeah but is that really a problem of the place, or of individuals just opting not to state their gender? Or maybe they just haven’t thought about it one way or another and the nature of their regular posting doesn’t make it clear one way or another.
That’s one of the differences with a personals profile vs. a “profile” as it’s configured here. With personals, one is actively prompted for gender.
I can’t tell if you’re mocking my earnest inquiry (so very earnest) or questioning my virtue :eek: but I assure you that what I both seek and offer has value far beyond the reaches of mere crass capitalism.
Assume for the moment that all members of this board are interested in ideas, the world, and other people. That doesn’t mean that all people who are interested in ideas, the world, and other people are members here. So you could look here and hope to find a partner with your desired gender, age, and location, or you could look on a more traditional personals site, filter by gender, age, and location, and hope to find someone with compatible ideas.
Or both.
I haven’t really noticed anyone here keeping their gender a secret, it’s just that with the nature of the discussions here it tends not to come up all that often. If this place is about ideas, then the ideas should be able to stand on their own apart from the person who posts them.
Personally, even when people do post their genders, I tend not to remember them very well. I’m that way in other contexts, too. I’ve had friends tell me about their friends and family, and I’ll remember the stories but not always associate them with the person they’re about. I think I need some direct, real-time exposure to someone to start to build a mental image of who they are. Once I have that I can start to remember details about them.
For me, interacting by text is quite different from interacting in person.
Thanks. I didn’t even know “paying member” was a thing. Yeah, I haven’t read every word of the FAQs and so forth. Guilty, guilty, guilty.
OTOH, the guy who made the suggestion upthread is listed as a Charter Member and apparently he wasn’t aware either, so I guess I shouldn’t feel too bad as a newbie to not have known this.
Nothing to be guilty about. Most of us learn by osmosis, not by reading the directions.
From the “user CP” link at the top you can access a variety of links including (at the very bottom) “paid subscriptions”. The main benefits are 1) no ads are served to your browser; and 2) you can access the built-in search facility. vBulletin search is kinda crappy, but has more insight into the board’s structure than does the alternative: Google/Bing/Etc searching within the domain “boards.straightdope.com”.
There are a couple of ancillary benefits besides. Including putting a picture in your profile.
