i guess it’s some sort of reverse Godwin’s law, still not helpful to the conversation at all, though. It’s totally off topic. No one is discussing whether any given religion may be odious nor should we do such here, simply that this is a global website so choosing a symbol from one religion is inappropriate here.
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The dagger is not associated with any religion. What group would really object to the dagger, other than the Assassination Guild?
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I would object to the dagger. As others have alluded to, I would also be uncomfortable with someone choosing a symbol that connotes religion, violence (assassination guild?), particular death / burial rituals (including headstones and flowers) etc., when a certain letter “D” for deceased (or other languages’ equivalent) would have no negative association and could be used instead. Please don’t assume that because you have no negative associations with a particular symbol(s) that others will be equally comfortable or even comforted by such symbols.
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Just for reference, this is what is being discussed, right?
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Dagger_(typography)
Some of those absolutely look like Christian crosses to me. I don’t really care in my own case, but i absolutely think some people might be uncomfortable with that. I am just not seeing the need, either, when there are other options.
from that Wikipedia article:
While daggers are freely used in English-language texts, they are often avoided in other languages because of their similarity to the Christian cross.
This is an international website.
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Ok, to be clear, I was not referring to any religion, culture or part of the world as odious. Just following Tony’s line of though that odious regimes lithe Nazis (or Stalinism) can actually produce useful things.
My main point was that “dead” is dead in any language or culture. It is a universal term. And I don’t believe we can please everyone - if I died, and knew I going to be referred to as having “passed on”, I’d be really annoyed. No matter what the language.
And that is all I am going to say on the matter - whatever the outcome is, I will accept it.
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when i die i need my tombstone entered onto iNat with at least 10 of the duplicate fields tagged in as ‘alive: no’
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I’m going to close this conversation as it seems to be veering off topic. Will update when we have heard from our legal counsel and have a proposed solution.
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Alright, after some discussions with our legal counsel, we’ve decided that it’s too difficult for us to verify that a deceased person is actually the owner of a specific account (in our records, we don’t have much more to go on than an email address and username), and thus we won’t be supporting a public-facing way to denote that a user has specifically passed away.
Rather than deceased, we will look into implementing a way to indicate that a user has not been active on iNat in a long time, or to easily see when they were last active, a request being discussed here: https://forum.inaturalist.org/t/make-it-more-visible-throughout-the-site-when-a-user-is-active-within-last-week/142/8
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