My last name is "Graham-Cumming". But here's a typical form response when I enter it:
Does the web site have any idea how rude it is to claim that my last name contains invalid characters? Clearly not. What they actually meant is: our web site will not accept that hyphen in your last name. But do they say that? No, of course not. They decide to shove in my face the claim that there's something wrong with my name.
There's nothing wrong with my name, just as there's nothing wrong with someone whose first name is Jean-Marie, or someone whose last name is O'Reilly.
What is wrong is that way this is being handled. If the system can't cope with non-letters and spaces it needs to say that. How about the following error message:
Don't blame me for having a last name that your system doesn't like, whose fault is that? Saying "Your last name contains invalid characters" is plain offensive. And I'm quite used to the situation that computer systems don't like the hyphen. On every flight I've ever been on I've been JOHN GRAHAMCUMMING.
The first time this happened the woman at the check-in counter did not say (in a robotic voice): "Your last name contains invalid characters", she actually said "I'm sorry, our system can't accept the hyphen". Fair enough.
So, form designers: stop blaming the user for your inadequacies.
PS Would accepting the hyphen actually destroy your database?
AOL sort of gets this right, although it claims it'll accepts numbers in a last name which, in fact, it won't:
Yahoo oddly believes that I don't know how to type my own name and decides to lowercase the C in Cumming. It's willing to accept the hyphen but not that I know who I am.
PPS Think of it this way; if I'm entering my name I'm probably signing up for your service. Do you really want part of my sign-up experience to be that you tell me that my name is invalid?
Does the web site have any idea how rude it is to claim that my last name contains invalid characters? Clearly not. What they actually meant is: our web site will not accept that hyphen in your last name. But do they say that? No, of course not. They decide to shove in my face the claim that there's something wrong with my name.
There's nothing wrong with my name, just as there's nothing wrong with someone whose first name is Jean-Marie, or someone whose last name is O'Reilly.
What is wrong is that way this is being handled. If the system can't cope with non-letters and spaces it needs to say that. How about the following error message:
Our system is unable to process last names that contain non-letters, please replace them with spaces.
Don't blame me for having a last name that your system doesn't like, whose fault is that? Saying "Your last name contains invalid characters" is plain offensive. And I'm quite used to the situation that computer systems don't like the hyphen. On every flight I've ever been on I've been JOHN GRAHAMCUMMING.
The first time this happened the woman at the check-in counter did not say (in a robotic voice): "Your last name contains invalid characters", she actually said "I'm sorry, our system can't accept the hyphen". Fair enough.
So, form designers: stop blaming the user for your inadequacies.
PS Would accepting the hyphen actually destroy your database?
AOL sort of gets this right, although it claims it'll accepts numbers in a last name which, in fact, it won't:
Yahoo oddly believes that I don't know how to type my own name and decides to lowercase the C in Cumming. It's willing to accept the hyphen but not that I know who I am.
PPS Think of it this way; if I'm entering my name I'm probably signing up for your service. Do you really want part of my sign-up experience to be that you tell me that my name is invalid?
Comments
Who am I to judge?
Some airlines have the same problem, which complicates passport identification (as the passport would have the hyphen but not the ticket).
Probably I should check with Barclaycard if they have corrected this problem by now.
In a similar same category, many sites would not accept email addresses that contain + (plus sign)in the username part, which is perfectly valid.
Some airlines have the same problem, which complicates passport identification (as the passport would have the hyphen but not the ticket).
Probably I should check with Barclaycard if they have corrected this problem by now.
In a similar same category, many sites would not accept email addresses that contain + (plus sign)in the username part, which is perfectly valid.
After making me wait for literally an hour the clerks came back to me looking very sheepish and said "We've found your account. The problem was that you wrote your surname on your form in upper and lower case letters, and it was stored on our system using upper case letters."
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I was born with a double barrelled surname, but my parents dropped one of the names while I was a minor, so my name changed too. Looks like I dodged a lot of anguish.
Anyway, they had a thing about Dick Cheney, except it said **** Cheney. I find it ironic they have a word filter built into it when they're the ones with the feed uplink.
...
Actually, the things that annoy me most are systems that once accepted something, but no longer do; and then they refuse to save an update because the unrelated, unchanged field is no longer acceptable.
http://xkcd.com/327/
But, yeah, it's a major issue and is annoying. Too often, the UI validation is written to make sense to the developers and not to the end-users.
Similarly, I've found it an issue with password rules. Far too often, sites will only inform you of its rules AFTER you try to submit the password (twice).
Hyphenated last names are a product of the baby-boomer narcissism of the upper middle class. It's not a sustainable practice, and as such, it reflects a "apre moi le deluge" attitude about life.
Suppose you get married to somebody else of the same social class, i.e., a woman who has a hypenated name. Suppose you have children, are they going to have names like
A-B-C-D ?
are their children going to have names like
A-B-C-D-E-F-G-H ?
Are their children going to have names like
A-B-C-D-E-F-G-H-I-J-K-L-M-N-O-P ?
At some point the self-aggrandizement has to stop. It's just one more example of a civilization that's given up on survival.
The fact is that such last names are common in Britain and are not a result of any action on my parents' part. In fact, my name is my father's last name, and his father's and his father's going back centuries.
I imagine most parents raise their children with the hopes that they'll be capable of making their intelligent choices, thus saving them from that slippery slope (which is a fallacy, by the way). It's more than a little nearsighted to base your own choices on the assumption that all your descendants will feel obligated to make the exact same ones. Maybe they'll each keep their own names, being M. A-B and M. C-D? Maybe they'll each pick one name, and be M. & M. A-D? Maybe they'll make up their own name and be M. & M. E? Maybe one will change to another's, and they'll be M. & M. A-B? Who cares? If your kids are old enough to get married, they should be old enough to figure out how they want to smush their names together without your help.
Ironically my husband has a space in his name, and you'd be surprised by how many systems flip out about plain old spaces. It made a convenient excuse to tell older, conservative relatives when they asked why I didn't change my name when we got married. ;)
Best so far? meltwaterdrive.com, who eventually corrected their registration screen to accept my name, but for whom every other profiel screen crashed on invalid email *even though no email field was present to edit*. Bad code from the ground up!
You would've been better off not using your computer today.
That article was "fucking retarded".
Stop getting so pissed off, as if you're being offended.
Ever heard the experience "Get the fuck over it".
It's Yahoo.
Not your girlfriend.
Deal with it.
Move on.
I agree with Mark, there are RFCs that were written a long time ago to deal with exactly this situation. Programmers and developers should research this before they start building.
Maybe not the hyphen. But an apostrophe (such as in O'Reilly) surely will. Just google SQL injection. Welcome to the wonderful world of Microsoft Sequel Sewer.
The best possible answer you might get is "okay, I understand that. Are we properly handling 80% of the most common cases, and have decent workaround for the other 20% ? Then maybe we can do that later".
The most likely answer is "WTF are you talking about ? We have a demo tomorrow, we must absolutely demonstrate feature XYZ that we completely forgot to tell you about, go code something !"
Both situations leads to stuff like the form we're talking about.
Don't get me wrong : both situations are inherently bad, sad, a shame, a pity, and proofs that our industry as a whole had better be dusting floors, growing pot or manufacturing cocktail glass umbrellas. In the end we'll all be dead and replace by younger, evenly incompetent versions of ourselves, so we might as well chill out.
http://pere.quintanasegui.com/spanish-names.html
It is frustrating that many sites consider that you surname is the last word of your full name. This does not work at all with Spanish surnames.
For example, Google Contacts has this problem. Google only provides one field to type contact names. When I sync my google contacts to my phone, the phone shows the surnames completelly wrong!
Is that difficult to include separate fields for name and surname?
(For companies who may call you, I'd like to have a field where you can tell them how to pronounce your name.)
Andy
I have a similar thing with emails that say: "your email program is incapable of showing our message properly" ... no, I just switched rtf off so I don't have to look at animated ads and so on just to read a message.
It is better just to put the plain text in the header instead.
I am trying to convince our client to allow any character, digits and symbols, but currently we are on the phase of allowing characters from any language and symbols like . - '
But who knows what kind of rules do we have worldwide? Have you heard about click-consonants used in some African languages? The allow !, |, ||, I with two horizontal cross, O with a dot inside etc... I don't understand why input fields have to have stupid validation rules.
My example: I have an 'ó' in my name. Once I could not use a webshop because they did not accept it as a valid name for credit card holder, but my bank did not accept my name with a simple 'o' O.o
- Why should people change their names to suit a stupid computer programmer?
- Even after 41 years in the business, the arrogance of computer programmers continues to surprise me.
- Hyphenated names are not unusual in the UK, and have been for decades, likely centuries. And they're an upper class affectation, not a middle class one.
- Don't move to Spain. Or Germany. Good luck getting them to change their naming traditions to suit your laziness.
- https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Leone_Sextus_Tollemache
See also http://www.w3schools.com/sql/sql_injection.asp
As for whether it's an "upper class affectation" or a "middle class affectation" is not relevant. The hyphenated names came first, and the programs and databases came after and should comply with reality, not lazy programming.
I've also seen examples where my doctor's name has been "anglicized" to MUNOZ as the Ñ was, apparently, not an acceptable character either.
THEY SAID THAT IS INVALID
NAME : DIEGO FELIPE
LAST NAME : FERNANDEZ
WHAT IS INVALID THERE THEY'RE SYSTEM SUCKS !!! THATS IT !!!
1) Irish: reduced form of O’Hayden, an Anglicized form of Gaelic Ó hÉideáin and Ó hÉidín ‘descendant of Éideán’ or ‘descendant of Éidín’, personal names apparently from a diminutive of éideadh ‘clothes’, ‘armor’. There was also a Norman family bearing the English name (see 2 below), living in County Wexford.
No, and it's common, but it's also wrong in a different way: it breaks name entry for the set of people that only have one name (which includes me). Or at least it needs to be carefully done and allow entry in only one field, which is extremely rare in my experience.
Treating names as anything other than by trying to split them up according to local custom does not work.
http://www.kalzumeus.com/2010/06/17/falsehoods-programmers-believe-about-names/ is a useful reference.
* Names will not contain a space
* Names will not contain more than a single space
* All parts of a name should Start With A Capital Letter
* ok if not starting with Caps that's limited to the very first part of a last name
for ref last name is "van der Linden" and it gets mangled all the time by various systems
Typically these are written on the card as NNNN NNNN NNNN NNNN with some sites insisting that only a 16 digit string is acceptable. (No doubt NNNNNN NNNNNNNNN N, would be considered "wrong" by such systems too.)
As with phone numbers the spaces are there to aid human readability. Wonder how many input validation routines would reject phone numbers which conform perfectly to E.164
Plus, changing one's name by deed poll or other means breaks the continuity of identity on documentation you have, which causes a whole different load of problems, quite aside from the simple fact that changing one's name is a personal choice with social implications that not everyone would want to do.
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