#transbucket

We released a bunch of changes, but we hope you don't notice some of them!

A lot of the changes are "invisible" ones to keep the site up to date. We upgraded from an older version of Ruby (the programming language most of the site is written in) to a newer version. This was to keep up with security updates with our cloud provider. We also added support for running our development environment using docker, which should make it much easier for volunteers to set up and contribute. Thanks volunteer C for this addition!

We also made a few changes we hope you do notice:

- The "Filter" control is "fixed." When you add filters, they will persist when navigating back and forth between individual results and the results page. When the site was first designed we saw the Filter as something to run on a single page of results you'd already gotten to from searching. But that's not how users used it. (Duh! Sorry!) It was a very frustrating experience for users to not have the control persist as they navigated. Now hopefully it works the way you expect!

- Procedure names and Surgeon names have enforced uniqueness controls. We have often seen Procedures get duplicated because users used different cases to describe them. That won't be possible anymore. Likewise, Surgeons must have a unique first and last name combination to be added. This doesn't prevent duplication due to misspelling but is a start.

- The comment notification mailer was pointing to the unsecured (http) version of the site. We changed it to secure (https). We also now distinguish between comments and questions so posters know what type of reply they got.

Transbucket has been around for years (nearly a decade in its current form, though it followed on from a similar site that shut down in 2009). I think it’s more widely used in countries other than the UK, and suspect that in the past few years sites such as tumblr and facebook have been more popular for sharing surgical results and experiences, which is possibly why it’s not that well known in certain groups nowadays. 

I don’t know much about pinterest, but as far as I can tell it’s nothing alike: you can’t ‘save’ other people’s submissions to your own account/pinboard or anything like that, it’s mainly just a site for searching and submitting trans people’s surgical results.

Basically: I don’t know of any specific reason to be wary of it. Of course, if sharing your own photos you should take the same precautions as you would anywhere else online (use an account name that can’t be easily traced to who you are IRL, avoid showing photos where you can be uniquely identified, e.g. by cropping out your face, and things like that). Other than that, it’s no more or less unsafe than any other place you would consider sharing details of your transition.

We were featured on as one of the Top 5 support sites for transgender people! Whoa!