danlev

Great point about the Equality Index being vertical -- that's something I've been considering.

Regarding it being represented as a number, I originally wanted to include that, however, the way the Equality Index is calculated is pretty rudimentary. Creating a number representing the "amount of equality" people have is going to be pretty arbitrary, especially without enough public opinion data. Eventually, once it becomes more sophisticated/accurate, and I include more data points and surveys, maybe I will reconsider. For now, I purposely left it as an unlabeled bar so that it's a little clearer that it's a "rough visualization."

What country is that? Every country is included on the site, however, provinces aren't always available for the more minor countries.

You can simply type it in? Are you running into an issue typing it in?

Or just visit http://equaldex.com/region/china or http://equaldex.com/region/japan and compare from the sidebar there.

I'm looking into that right now. Not sure why both of those entries are referring to the age of consent rather than simply homosexual activity being legal/illegal (the both received quite a few accurate votes too). Age of consent has a separate section further down the page.

The site is crowdsourced, so if you click "Accurate?: No" on anything incorrect (on a country's page), you can supply details so that our moderators can look into it. :) Thanks!

"Conversion therapy" is a controversial therapy used to "convert" gay people "back to straight." The process is almost always heavily influenced by religion, and can be very harmful, psychologically. Some gay people are forced into this against their will, by their parents. There have been cases where people have committed suicide or had suicidal thoughts.

The organizations who run the therapy are super sketchy as well.

Wikipedia has some extensive information on it: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Conversion_therapy

I've run into that issue a few times but I thought I fixed it. Before, reloading seemed to have fixed it. I'll look into it though. Thanks for pointing it out! :)

http://www.moanmyip.com is still better.

Wow, thank you so much! Glad to hear! Are you mostly referring to the news share through Equaldex's social media accounts (mostly syndicated from http://equaldex.com/news)? Or the site itself?

Personal account: http://twitter.com/danlev

My LGBT rights site's account: http://twitter.com/equaldex

This is amazing news!

Yeah, I did it just for the ease, then it turned out to be more work than it was worth.

Yes. And isn't it funny that we've become BFFs through a Hacker News post?

Wow, thanks so much! I appreciate it! When the site first launched in February, someone submitted it HN and it didn't receive any traction as well. :( Maybe someday!

Thanks so much!

The whole site (including LGBT News) is built from scratch, using PHP and MySQL. I came across a few turnkey Hacker News sites, but didn't really like any of them. I decided to build LGBT News from scratch just because I thought it'd be easier to integrate into the existing site, and I thought it'd be a fun project (I usually tend to do that for the learning experience).

Login uses Facebook Login (which has been a huge headache), countries and regions were implemented using an ISO database, and some of the additional data (population, religions, etc.) comes from Freebase.

LGBT News is part of a larger site -- Equaldex (http://equaldex.com) is a crowdsourced database of LGBT rights, showing every law related to the LGBT rights in each country and region.

I created LGBT News because there was a lack of other information outside of the actual laws in each country and region. When you visit Russia's page (http://equaldex.com/region/russia), you might assume that it's a little more LGBT-friendly than it is, but if you see some recent headlines about LGBT rights in Russia, it might give you a totally different impression.

When you submit news to LGBT News, you tag it with a country or region so that the news is then surfaced to that country's page.