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Bboy wrote: Thu Dec 27, 2001 1:01 pm My thought would be to have the person enter the full date of birth ... month, day, and year, and then have a checkbox to either display or hide the birthdate in the listing.

If the person chooses to hide the birthdate then only the calculated age would appear to the public. ...

I could live with that. The other possibility is to hide everything (even calculated age) if the user chooses to hide the birthdate. It depends on whether you think that people who want to hide their age should be able to do so.

Birthdays that are hidden in the Personals listing should also be omitted from the EA Calendar.

peter

(54 and proud of it)

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Losethem (imported) wrote: Thu Dec 27, 2001 5:50 pm Perhaps a way to overcome this is the let a person enter the year and a 3 month window for their age. The computer could base the calculation on the age that way, and at most it would be 3 months off.

I am sure that for Paolo, this would be a SMOP (simple matter of programming). My fear is that allowing people to enter either a 3-month window or a complete date (necessary if we want to preserve the calendar birthday listing) would make the input form a bit too complex/confusing. As a programmer, I lean toward keeping things simple.

As a practical matter, I think that getting the age within plus or minus one year is close enough.

peter

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Marc (imported) wrote: Tue Dec 25, 2001 1:59 am How about some of these?

If someone is looking for a lover to accept them after they have what they are looking for.

...whether they want to have sexual activity after say a penectomy, or castration, and whether they will want to have HRTs to supplement their otherwise 'flagging' abilities...

Are they looking for someone to castrate - either for themselves as a partner/lover, or just for the interest...

Of real interest to lil ole me is whether someone would look here in the EA for someone to have a relationship with...

Maybe we could have a 'Match-Maker' type of board...

I would like to see all of these and the items that Bboy, Paolo, and luvpain suggested. The interesting problem becomes, how do you structure this information?

If you make a separate database field for each item, it will be easier to do a search, but entering the data will be difficult and frustrating for those of us who don't fit neatly into categories or who do not consider the questions applicable to them. On the other hand, if all questions are entirely open-ended (e.g., "Tell us everything you want us to know about yourself"), the answers will be incomplete. The questionnaire should provide enough guidance to encourage informative responses but should be flexible enough for people to add any information that they might want to include.

If the questions are more flexible than structured, the search engine should also be flexible. For instance, it would be useful to be able to search for all people who have the word "California" in any field of their questionnaire, in addition to more structured searches, e.g., finding all people who have had penectomies.

A good matchmaker questionnaire is difficult to create and not worth it, in my opinion. These usually require the designer to decide what makes a good match. For instance, are two people who want to be castrated a better match than one penectomized person and one eunuch, and are these more closely matched than one dominant and one submissive person. I think one can better find a soulmate by reading postings on this message board, and looking at the profiles of those who look interesting.

peter

Thanks Peter,

You just clarified a point I was trying to make, but somehow got side-tracked in the usual form.

I think the idea of a Match-Maker feature would be nice, but, you are 100% correct in trying to fit the information gathered by that feature into a workable item. Yet, the idea (not necessarily the 'title') may have some value.

Was really thinking more along the lines of a place to submit an enquirey regarding a potential LTR.....sort of like the classified pages of a newspaper - only with the twist of advertising the person, and not necessarily what is under the bonnet or the boot. (i.e. hood and trunk for thems of usn who are American...hehehe!! )

I think the question/answer line here will really help to work this thing out smoothly enough for us all to use competently.

Anyone have any other ideas????? Bboy? You have anything new and exciting to add here????? (that is a very broad hint, ya know!!:p )

Love ya!!

Marc