Comment by thomasfoster96 | Hacker News Reader

Comment by thomasfoster96 | Hacker News Reader

I know people see No. 29 on this list and decide that their product or service will only be used by English speakers of European descent, but from experience even with these extraordinarily low requirements for testing most services fail. I’ve got three short (<8 letters) entirely ASCII names, and even then I still have trouble:

* I regularly get letters addressed to my first name and my middle name, missing my surname.

* Banks and airlines always seem to try a different way of dealing my middle name, from only using an initial to abbreviating it to anywhere from three to six characters.

* A friend once got issued travel documents where all of their given names were concatenated together (no spaces) and printed after their last name.

* Many websites still require you to pick an honourific from a drop down menu, but the options vary considerably (and usage is different in every country, even with a common language). Just make it a text field and be done with it.

I really don’t think it’s too difficult nowadays, especially if you’re writing something from scratch, to just accept really long Unicode strings and store given names and surnames separately. And it’s not like testing this is difficult - you can find datasets of a few hundred names in different languages and scripts fairly easily.

I'm sure it's not easy. Even if you're writing from scratch. Imagine you're making a new travel site. You add the any size name field. But, you have to send that name to airlines, hotels, car rentals, credit card companies, all of which will have different limits.

There are a number of websites now which ask me for my “name as it appears on your card” when doing transactions/bookings, which seems like a decent solution. I’ve also had had hotels ask for a card number or some form of ID, which also seems more sensible than asking for a name.

To your second and third point, recently traveled internationally and the airline concatenated my first and middle name on my ticket and boarding passes. My passport has a space between my first name and middle initial My driver’s license has a space between my first name and middle name.

Needless to say, I was unable to check in online or with one of the machines at the airport.

I had something similar happen on a recent flight (First name and middle initial concatenated) but had no issues with checking in.

For some reason Delta prints GAVINJ as my first name on all tickets even though the J is the first letter of my middle name. When I book flights this isn’t the case, either directly or through a 3rd-party; I assume they have some master record in a mainframe somewhere that was created by some other system incorrectly and I’m stuck with it forever.

However, I’ve flown hundreds of times and nobody who has checked my ID has ever been bothered by this, which is a little worrying.

Why is it worrying? What would you prefer they do?

"Many websites still require you to pick an honourific from a drop down menu, but the options vary considerably"

In Switzerland, many major web sites are offered in multiple languages, including sometimes English. Yesterday I ordered off the English language version of a site I generally use in German, and was amused to see the order be addressed to "Sir <My Name>".

Was “Sir” a translation?

“Master” vs “mister” is annoying because technically there are a lot of rules about the use of one or the other, but these rules differ considerably between countries. Apparently in parts of the US it would be rude to refer to anyone over 12 as “master”, but in other situations I’ve been told it’s perfectly acceptable until early adulthood, or until one becomes a father or marries. I generally hope forms only give me “Mr.” as an option.

A translation of "Herr", which as a form of address simply means "Mr." (though by itself, it also refers to God, i.e. "Lord"; at least they did not call me "Lord X").

Same; I have a suffix and it often gets concatenated onto my first or last name.

My son has a further generational suffix and his often gets truncated to a single letter and used has his middle initial.

Our names are basic short-ish names using standard ASCII characters and most systems still fuck it up.

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