Wow,
Someone once wrote a story about a man building a fence and everyone wrote essays about all the meaning behind it, how it was all about people isolating themselelves from others and the author got very indignant and stated that none of that was true. It was simply a story about a man building a fence and had absolutly no deeper meaning at all. It's amazing how people read so much into simple things.
The Nexus cafe is going to be a collection of many individual sites (Not just the Reiki Cafe), and many of the people who will be using these sites will be hoping that one of the wonderful people encountered may end up being a romantic partner. Some of the sites will be explicitly personal sites. It makes much more sense both technologicly and logicly to make ethnicity a part of the global user profile as this is not likely to change and it would be quite annoying to keep entering it in for each individual profile as well as wasting space. I have found this thread of conversation to be interesting but making a whole lot out of nothing. All of the extra profile information is optional. If someone wants people to know then they have the option and having an option is better than having no option.
A while ago someone told me that she had met her soul mate on the Reiki Cafe. I thought that was great. The site had a real and direct impact on two peoples lives. While this is not a personals site, there will always be that element involved for any community site and I see no reason to stiffle it.
As for the individual choices, I copied it straight from Yayoo. If you would like to give me a list of all the different ethinicities I can put it in. I simply don't know every possible option. The reason It is a pull down choice and not a fill in is because this way allows me to associate a number with each choice that can be easily indexed in the database. It is a pure technology issue.
Everyone is different and there are many different reasons for using this site. My intention is for this site to be very different from the other sites out there because I think that many of the people making sites are not making them to be as useful as they could be. Someone makes a silly design and everyone else copies it. I'm making my own design and I believe there are many people who think having an Ethnicity field in the user profile is useful. Yes, having a fuller list of choices will certainly be more helpful. If you have one please send it to me. I have a full time job and have been doing this in my limited spare time.
Namaste,
-Mike
