Status title should be gender-dependant

[Sergey Kirienko]

Binary package hint: gossip

Actually, it is a bug of all contemporary messengers. But as far as I use Gossip, I report here.

English language doesn't have gender category, but many other languages do. It means that people use one word for male contacts and another for female.
Example: status title Away is now translated to Russian as «Ушёл». But this makes sense only for masculine contacts. For females it should be: «Ушла». There are a lot of other languages beside Russian having gender category: Spanish, Portuguese, French. For example, "Busy" in Portuguese should be "Ocupado" for men and "Ocupada" for women.
Now it is just like, contacts have female names or nicknames, female avatars (maybe even photos) and standard status message, but telling us "I'm a man"! This is weird, we know they are females.

This is important because instant messaging is so personal. When you chatting with your girlfriend, it is stupid, that the computer tells you things about her like "HE is now online".

Expected behavior. XMPP specifications have gender field for contacts. Most of the closed IM networks have it too. ICQ even has default male and female (and neutral) avatars for users. Application should use (if available) contact gender information and show the right statuses.

[Sergey Kirienko (skirienko)]

Looks like Empathy has better future.

[Guillaume Desmottes (cassidy)]

Sounds like something that would be good to fix.

[Guillaume Desmottes (cassidy)]

I forwared this issue upstream: http://bugzilla.gnome.org/show_bug.cgi?id=512539

[emory (emoryl)]

I would prefer and recommend that we stop using gender-specific anything and removing the dependency. Gender isn't a binary "male" "female" for many people and I think it would be best if localized binaries of IM clients instead use words that don't have a gender designation or implication.

"Away" or "Busy" in English have nothing to do with the gender of the party that has assigned that presence. If localizations are assigning gender to contacts in the roster, it should (in my opinion) not assign a gender of any kind to a contact.

[Maia Everett (linneris)]

I concur with emory. Statuses should be gender-neutral - in *all* localizations. If the Russian localization is worded in a gender-specific way, it's the Russian localization's problem. (I would suggest gender-neutral Russian translations such as "Нет на месте").

Empathy doesn't even have a setting for user gender and frankly, it's none of its business.