Quote Originally Posted by Ezri
Quote Originally Posted by mishau_
In Russian we can recognize sexes of internet forum visitors by names and nicks and also by the proper endings of verbs in the past tense and by the proper endings of ajectives. As for English forums, what bothers me a lot is that very often I can't recognize who I'm talking to, a woman or a man. So in what way do they usually find out wether they're talking to a girl or a guy?
An interesting point.
Personally I find you can generally guess, but most of the time I will simply ask. It's nice to get the idea of a persons gender and general age and location, something humans have been used to knowing only since the advent of the WWW.
By the way, I'm female, 35, Wales.
Well, I haven't been on the internet quite that long but even when I started, most of the sites I visited tended to be filled with geeky guys, so if one of the posters was a girl, she tended to get *quite* a bit of attention. Back when I used to play Everquest (an online Role Playing Game), my girlfriend always played male characters. She said she just got bothered too much playing female characters. Nowadays, I just assume everyone on the internet is a guy unless they tell me otherwise, or it's very obvious.

And yeah, I imagine that Russia is similar to the US and most other countries when it comes to crime. In the US at least, if you stay out of the bad neighborhoods and don't associate with criminals, your chances of being murdered are extremely small.