After exactly 2 months waiting for an invitation to the beta release of Ravelry, Sunday was the fateful day when I was finally able to log into this much-hyped social networking site for yarn-people. As a veteran of social networks (it is my profession you know) I was very interested to see what the buzz was about.
First impressions were very good! Navigation takes a bit to get use to but is pretty intuitive. This is important - you should be able to get where you want to go without reading directions on how to navigate. I enjoyed browsing different users, projects and yarn.
So all was going great until .. yeah, here is where the shoe drops .. I go to fill out my profile. Again, really nice interface until I get to the profile question "Fave curse word" ... excuse me? On most social sites, if you leave a field blank it will not show so I try that. No luck .. that question still on my profile.... insert grumble.
So this is what I put and I feel very strongly about profanity and cursing on the net:
I really don't like having this field on my profile as I don't like seeing profanity on the web. I don't think it is needed on a crafting site.
I know I cannot keep people from using curse words on the net - I'm not that Pollyanna - but to encourage it is another matter. On blogs, if the author uses what I consider too much profanity, I have the choice to not view that blog - I had to do with one of my favorite bloggers. But on a site like Ravelry, I believe promoting the use of profanity is inexcusable.
I am hoping the owners of the site remove this profile field before releasing the product out of beta.
till later ~~ Dene
