Is stating age ranges against the rules now?

[Shian]

Awesome. Thanks

[pizzas and scream]

Really? Good thing I removed it from my signature then.. I see why they might add that rule, though, since I saw a few people with something like "14+" in their signature and I feel like the age idea should just be like 13+ or 18+ so I would believe they just put their age and the +

I also don't really see the reason people need to share their age either? o-o

either to brag or be "don't hurt me/go easy on me, i'm young", "i know more and better because older"

I thought part of the communication moral rules here was "assume everyone is 13-17"

[HorseDad]

what about putting "senior" In your profile? Is there enough range? for you would be a highschool senior, college senior- or even a senior citizen haha

[ede]

No one has been given an official board warning for this rule clarification. We have sent private messages requesting the removal of age ranges, but we have not issued warnings.

I have definitely received a warning for stating my age range in a post, the warning was on my profile for about a month. Not sure what counts as a official board warning, but I definitely had it in writing on my profile that I had received a warning.

[troyards]

what about putting "senior" In your profile? Is there enough range? for you would be a highschool senior, college senior- or even a senior citizen haha

can't state grade. i've gotten a warning for that before but i believe you can say that you are in high school or college without giving a grade delimiter?

tho don't quote me on that bc i've forgotten how exactly i worded the above that resulted in the warning but it was bc i stated my grade.

[nickjr]

For those who don't frequent the 18+ board, there are a few topics in there where it's pretty common/tempting for people to state age ranges/grades/etc in order to give more background (e.g. Younger people asking for advice sticky, college/major thread). I would encourage people to be cagey, and I try to be cagey myself, but I definitely understand the struggle of trying to get people to understand where I am in life without giving away my age or at least an age range. A difference of even one grade level means a lot in high school and college undergraduate years, at least in the US if not also in other countries that many CS users are from, so when people try to ask for help about high school or college... (good thing it's not too big of a deal for people to answer with "if you're a freshman, x; if you're a senior, y")

If you feel the need to say "I'm a senior", then you probably are sharing a situation that makes it clear exactly which senior you mean.

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So if we can't share stuff like 18+, I assume we can't be specific like "I'm old enough to drive in the US" (even though the age varies by state) or "I'm a legal adult in the US" (we should just say "I'm an adult" instead) etc? Because those seem to just be proxies for 15+/16+/18+

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Another issue that I'm assuming staff has been discussing since I sent in a help ticket about it: zodiac signs

If your posts show that you're in grade school, then a zodiac sign is even more incriminating of your age than a grade level. (That being said, a grade level is still too much information.) It only becomes hard to guess the range of your birthday once you say that you're in the workforce...

But since it takes a bit of work to dig through someone's posts, and since the zodiac sign isn't incriminating by itself...
I imagine this would be along the same lines as why we can share age ranges at all; we can look through someone's posts and see when they stop talking about high school and when they start talking about college, but that takes effort and not everyone is going to have an obvious divide like that
(When I got older and thought about my privacy even more than I already did, I realized that anyone looking through my posts would be able to identify my age based on when I stopped talking about APs and started talking about professors. Went back and modified a lot of my posts to have more vague wording)

edit: plus that'd be a pain to moderate

[Shian]

what about putting "senior" In your profile? Is there enough range? for you would be a highschool senior, college senior- or even a senior citizen haha

can't state grade. i've gotten a warning for that before but i believe you can say that you are in high school or college without giving a grade delimiter?

High school age is really easy to figure out. You might as well say "I'm between 15 and 18". I mean, have you ever been in a class in High school with someone who was 10? or 22?
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Education ... ted_States

College isn't as easy to guess since there's all kinds of age ranges. Last class I took, there was a 60-something year old woman who was retired and went to college because it was something she hadn't done yet and wanted to get it off her bucket list.

Another issue that I'm assuming staff has been discussing since I sent in a help ticket about it: zodiac signs

Zodiac signs have always bothered me too. It's very -very- easy to figure out exactly how old someone is by just thumbing through a few of their posts. Especially if they state element and animal. All you have to do is look at the wiki.

[pizzas and scream]

what about putting "senior" In your profile? Is there enough range? for you would be a highschool senior, college senior- or even a senior citizen haha

can't state grade. i've gotten a warning for that before but i believe you can say that you are in high school or college without giving a grade delimiter?

High school age is really easy to figure out. You might as well say "I'm between 15 and 18". I mean, have you ever been in a class in High school with someone who was 10? or 22?
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Education ... ted_States

College isn't as easy to guess since there's all kinds of age ranges. Last class I took, there was a 60-something year old woman who was retired and went to college because it was something she hadn't done yet and wanted to get it off her bucket list.

Another issue that I'm assuming staff has been discussing since I sent in a help ticket about it: zodiac signs

Zodiac signs have always bothered me too. It's very -very- easy to figure out exactly how old someone is by just thumbing through a few of their posts. Especially if they state element and animal. All you have to do is look at the wiki.

prodgeity in highschool at 10, I think a person with some disabilities can continue HS untill age 22. but those are severe medical conditions and cognitive/neurological/ type issues involved

the only down side to the "don't give hints" is if someone needs to tell someone that it's a bad idea for them being a HS freshmen to be dating a 19 year old. I think somewhere at one point here, there was someone who was and was advised to break it up due to many factors (one being that the guy might not want them when he is 22 and in college the other, that may of been a 14 and 19 year old relationship) on the other hand it can go the other way, with someone who is 18 thinking they can date a 13 year old freshman. witha "I have a crush on someone 5 years younger than I am, and people tell me I should not"

but if I see those age gaps "help me" I'm going to just really assume the worst and not "i'm 20, they are 25, people say that is weird"

[nickjr]

Yeah, the example I gave for zodiac signs in my help ticket is this: if soneone posts that they're a sheep and another post of theirs says they're still in grade school (regardless of which level of grade school), it's super improbable that they were born in 1991 or 2015 (LOL) rather than February 2003 - January 2004...

I mean, even with grade levels in grade school, you can get a range that spans like 3 years because it's not that rare for someone to have entered school late/early or to have been held back/to have skipped a grade. (Still uncommon enough and narrow enough for grade level to be too much info. Exceptions of more than 1 year are rare enough for a span of 3 years to make you accurate a LOT of the time, especially if the poster grew up in a developed country.) Once you get into schools past high school, it's an even wider range since gap years and long-periods-of-no-postsecondary-education are a thing. But zodiac signs? There's no wiggle room and the displacement is way too large. It's not too bad if you already graduated college, but before then? If you're old enough to be posting on CS and you're still in grade school, then there's really only one option per zodiac sign, and exceptions that displace you TWELVE YEARS at that period are way too rare. Element isn't even needed but is just the cherry on top. (Element combined with animal does become pretty incriminating for adults...)

And then there's the issue of how to moderate that. The straight solution of disallowing sharing of zodiac signs would probably have a lot of backlash. It's fun to share our signs and compare ourselves to the supposedly common traits of our animal. And it's not instantly incriminating. But in my opinion it's incriminating enough for a LOT of CS posters that I really feel that it is an issue

[Shian]

Wouldn't be difficult at all, just delete the thread that asks what is your zodiac sign and stop asking for it every year. It's really strange that these rules are being clamped down on now (was abundant three years ago to have 13+ or 15+ in sig etc) but zodiac sign is ok for no reason at all. It's more dangerous than an age range because it gives you an exact year.