[No patch] Think about profiling, discrimination and harassment implications of user pictures/icons

What exactly is the purpose of this issue?? It sounds like this could easily turn the community into a witch hunt or at the very least towards a police state mentality. Shouldn't these really just be addressed on a case by case basis using the normal DCoC procedures, if some of them really are an issue (with good rationale behind them)?

I was going to open a similar issue, thanks for beating me to it.

For incidents, the one that prompted me to consider opening an issue was #2275877-23: Replace "master/slave" terminology with "primary/replica" where Crell attempted to guess the racial background of posters on that issue via their avatars.

See #2275877-39: Replace "master/slave" terminology with "primary/replica" and #2275877-41: Replace "master/slave" terminology with "primary/replica" for responses to that on the issue and why it's not OK. I can't really imagine that happening without the avatars there.

@Mark the original intention of enabling avatars was to make the community more welcoming in the hope that people would be politer when they associate someone's comments with their face, as well as things like being able to recognise people quicker. If there are cases where they're having the opposite effect, then that should be discussed.

'Witch hunt' and 'police state' are over-reactions to an issue such as this, no one is going to get drowned/burned or locked up. Rather than go into free speech arguments in depth, http://xkcd.com/1357/

I'm fine with changing profile picture to profile icon. Or we could just call it an Avatar or even Drupalize it and call it a Davitar.

But not sure it's a big deal. There's the admin side mostly I think:

But the help text already says "Your virtual face or picture. Pictures larger than 1024x1024 pixels will be scaled down."

I'm worried that we're looking for the existance of a problem without having any reason to believe it is a problem.

It seems often online guys sometimes don't rise to the highest levels of human interaction.... There's no reason for everyone not to put up some icon like @xjm has in her profile.

But I'm not sure how we could start tracking this.

I kind of see what is trying to be accomplished, however my choice of words were appropriate given the words used in the issue title: "investigate", "discrimination" and "harassment". These words convey an entirely different meaning than what, I now believe, is something entirely different.

I am, however, inclined to agree with @mgifford:

I'm worried that we're looking for the existance of a problem without having any reason to believe it is a problem.

I'm sorry, the title just keeps rubbing me the wrong way in lieu of recent events.

Rename profile picture to profile icon

The form elements are from Drupal core. If there needs to be a change, it would be ideal to make it there. Even if it doesn't get backported to D7, aligning to improved copy in D8 reduces how much custom code we need.

Go back in the history of the origins of the user profile pictures, see if there was investigation on some of the implications of pictures already.

I'm not aware of any formal investigation.

#2276087: Allow for a selection of user avatars would be nice to do, regardless of why its done. I'm not sure what else we can do, other than letting the Community Working Group know that this issue is waiting for any information they have on incidents. This issue might be better in the https://drupal.org/project/issues/drupal-cwg queue.

Since this is getting into the dcoc & their incident report form, I'm going ahead and moving this issue.

@Drumm thanks for moving this to our queue - it's on our radar.

We now have this conflict resolution policy http://drupal.org/conflict-resolution - so I guess the question is whether or not that is sufficient to deal with this issue?

Thoughts?

All of the previous discussions around user pictures are public on the issue queue, so I'm pretty sure anyone could do the research about whether this specific aspect has been talked about before. My recollection is it hasn't. We can also do some Googling around other projects' terms of uses and/or scholarly research, though I have my doubts about that since it's extremely specific. But again, this doesn't require the CWG to do this; this information is also public.

So I'm missing where the CWG fits into this a bit, I guess. The CWG is here to create and effect policy about community interactions. Is there a specific proposed amendment to the Code of Conduct or Conflict Resolution Policy around this issue? Is there a proposal that we need separate policy specifically for this issue, and if so what?

Maybe a better status for this is "postponed (needs more info)" until that research you're asking for is done by someone?

And to be clear, I think the CWG probably *could* do this research if no one else is willing/able to. I guess my worry is there's a ton of other things going on in any given week that are more actively on fire than this, so it'd most likely be awhile. So I'd really rather not make the CWG a blocker here. If OTOH we're given a specific proposal that has buy-in from various folks it's pretty easy for us to promote it widely + get it accepted fairly fast.

My concern with the avatars was that within a week or so of the feature being launched I'd heard anecdotally about one thing on twitter then saw another in the issue queue. If nothing happens again we can say this was isolated. If there's another one in a few weeks/months then I think it would need more of a look at the feature in general as to whether it's enabling specific patterns of behaviour. As I understand it part of the goal of introducing avatars was to encourage better interpersonal interactions in the issue queue, so this seems like part of evaluating whether that aim has been met.

Closing out this issue, as I think the concerns here are largely covered under sections C and D of our Terms of Service (https://www.drupal.org/terms), which was adopted last year. If people do run across avatars, icons, or profile images they feel violate those terms, they can either file an issue in this queue or file a confidential incident report with the CWG (https://www.drupal.org/governance/community-working-group/incident-report).