litphoria

The kind of hair color a character has.

I care about gender expression. I care very much that a character I play with in any sexually or possibly sexual manner does not present as female outwardly.

It is still extremely and needlessly pedantic. What kind of clothes you wear and activities you partake in? It's so ridiculously artificial and aesthetic. What's a fucking "Masculine" activity? Playing ball? Watching sports? My aunt is the biggest red sox fan in existence and I wouldn't describe her as "Gender expression male" or even androgynous since she still enjoys "feminine activities." but I digress. The point I'm trying to make is that gender expression is kinda ridiculous to have on there since it is much better handled by the description. Meanwhile hair color is a minor trait that almost every human being has and tons of fictional races from elves to dwarves to orcs to aliens to anthros have hair and we don't have that because "People can't prefer certain hair colors over others" which is a flat out lie and a huge generalization. One of my regulars has a huge fucking thing for red heads. I like brown and black haired guys over red heads. So what makes your preferences more important than mine?

Traits are for searching, the description is where you do your character building.

And you can EASILY put your gender expression in the description box as well. The main problem with putting anything in the description is that due to it's layout the description of every character is reduced in importance by being on the bottom. You've basically made a book for each character and yet you don't offer options like hair color and eye color?

functionally useless-for-search descriptors

There is already countless useless search descriptors such as employment and gender expression. It baffles me how you're terribly specific about a characters gender expression yet you act incredulous over someone else who expresses distaste in certain hair colors. Could you be any more hypocritical?

If you're using the description box to clarify how the thing you picked isn't really correct, then the trait and context have failed you and it might as well not have existed.

Except never in the entire post did I indicate this. The description is to detail the specifics of your choice. "Pink" is your general hair color "Neon pink" is your specific shade. Litphoria already has an "other" option for tons of categories. Employment especially demonstrates this, even though employment itself should be a fill in because there is so many countless jobs that you'd end up with a list bigger than f-lists kinklist.

Really, building your entire website around a "comparison" function isn't really all that good of an idea. People are complex and some people want to make complex characters and yet this website doesn't implement customization options purely because they wouldn't mesh with the comparison function? This is on top of pushing the description down to the bottom. I've learned from f-list that people aren't going to read ANY of this and are going to glance over it at best. If this place's aim is to get popular then it is going to become filled with people who don't care about this sort of thing.

Woah, jeez. Let's simmer down here.

I feel like I'm a bit late to this discussion, but I'll put in my two cents. At first I actually didn't want to have hair color. Mainly for the reason of "too many possibilities". I myself love the odd ones, like purple, blue, etc. But, I kept thinking about it and honestly, I'm on the other side of the fence now. The bottom line is that things like the color of someone's hair, eye, skin/fur, etc DO have an impact on our interest in that person. Think about the fairly common questions like "Do you like redheads?" and I think that's a good enough reason for something like this. Sure, many people won't really care one way or another, and with the implementation of the "All Remaining" button to preferences, they are handled just fine. But many people may have much more specific preferences than that, and it's just one more way to get a person's interest(or disinterest). I do think it shouldn't go overboard though. The realistic colors and then the more basic colors that you see floating around, anything more specific can be handled by the additional text.

I did also think of another option, but this could be a separate choice if colors were implemented: You could just have a "Hair" Trait, with categories for length, instead of color, and then the text could be used to describe the color. Length is a lot easier to categorize, in my opinion, but just by having Hair, you encourage the user to describe the length, style AND the color, without overwhelming them with options. I think this is also something very easily done with Eyes. Options could range from "Slit Pupils" to "No Pupils" to "Other" for weird anime type stuff. If you implemented eye color separately though, you could have the category of "Heterochromic" which I do imagine people might like enough to search for.

In short, I think there's really two options: Have a separate trait for Hair Length and Hair Color, and try to stay pretty simple with the color options, or just have Hair and have the categories be for length, while allowing users to fill in the text to describe the color. I think the same concept fits with Eyes.

The problem with a more general hair trait is we need categories on traits. That is the same problems with have with hair color, actually, only it would be a lot worse because it would be both the hair color and length and possibly even the style (pixie, long, short, etc).

I agree and recognize that some users will have a preference for blondes, red hairs, exotic colors, or just simply the natural ones. The trouble is finding a way to express that without creating tons and tons of options for every possible color.

Well, if it was just the general Hair, my suggestion is having the categories just be regarding length. Having the name be general would just be to encourage people to fill out the other details themselves. If you actually wanted to have categories for different lengths colors and styles then I agree, that would just not work with a general trait. And I REALLY don't think a hair style trait would work. I think it's even more capable of getting overflowed than color would be, there are just way too many weird ass hairstyles that someone might want added. I think a simple Length would be best for that, with Short, Medium, Long, and maybe Very long. Or they can be a bit more discriptive: Bald, Short, Shoulder Length, Long(would encompass between shoulder length and maybe down to bum length), and then Very long for anything past that.

As for colors, like I said, keep it limited to really basic colors, don't go into shades, because that's the pitfall. I think if you keep it basic you'd probably still end up with less options than the employment trait. Off the top of my head, here's the colors I would include: Blonde, Brown, Black, White, Red, Blue, Green, Purple, Multicolor, and mayyybe Pink(just because it's common enough and different enough that it might need to be separate from red, but honestly I could see it work with just the Red too).

I think if we were to add such a trait, we would have to do it like this:

Hair Color
The kind of hair color a character has.

Categories
Blonde, Black, Brown, Red, White, Dyed (or un-natural)

With all of the natural hair colors laid out and a single "catch all" for the more exotic ones. Since I doubt someone would be OK with pink hair but not purple or fuchsia.

I like that. It still allows specification for the 'normal' colors, but gives an option for the weird stuff. That handles people that only like normal colors much easier as well.

Because OP is asleep, I have edited this to fit what we have reached after discussion. Categories will have to be considered carefully (potentially like my list) to avoid getting out-of-hand.