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Comment by GavinB | Hacker News Reader

My first name is spelled with a $10 bill. It's pronounced "Gavin." My last name is a picture of a flower. If you represent it at less than 1000x1000 pixels or with washed out colors, you are insulting my heritage.

My middle name is a musk ox.

How far does politeness dictate that you have to go to accommodate me?

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I think that the bar should at least be set higher than:

  "Your name does not fit into a Western firstname/lastname
  format with only ASCII characters, please choose another
  name."

This is on par with expecting everyone to speak English just because you speak English. By the very setup of the form, you are implying that your way is the 'one true way' or at least that you don't care about people that don't fit into your pre-defined set of expectations (i.e. "Don't have a firstname/lastname? I don't care about your business! Your money is no good here!").

How hard is it to just have a 'Name' field that supports UTF8? Sure it's not a 100% solution, but it's a lot better than the 20% (or less) solutions that we have out there right now.

http://vodpod.com/watch/1616920-funny-hugh-laurie-stephen-fr...

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