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Comment by marcus_holmes | Hacker News Reader

The point is that First Name and Last Name do not correspond to Family Name and Given Name, which is actually what is desired (you can start an email to me as "Hello <Given Name>", and be reasonably sure of avoiding insult. You can't do that with "Hello <First Name>", you will definitely insult some people).

However, I don't do this. If I want someone's name so I can talk to them, I just ask them "what do you want us to call you?" with a single field (and if they enter "Captain HugePenis" then I cheerfully start the email "Hello Captain HugePenis,"). I only use Given/Family if I need their official name for bureaucracy reasons, and then it's very much "what's your name as it is written in your passport/id?", and I don't use it to address them, because it's very easy to get wrong.

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I used to use this as a mild form of spam detection, like people do with "+" email aliases, by adding something to the "what do you want us to call you?" field that was specific to the site.

Then, if I started getting spam to that name, I knew who sold me out.

It was especially useful for physical spam mail that wasn't coming to an email address. I discovered quite quickly which magazine gave all my info to every company that wanted it.

In German, you have to ask the customer whether they want to be addressed in the formal way “Sehr geehrter Herr Schmidt” (esteemed Mr. Schmidt might be an approximate translation, of course this sounds totally off in English) or the informal way “Hallo Paul”, or maybe they prefer “Lieber Paul” (dear Paul) or even “Lieber Herr Schmidt”! Note that the formal and informal ways use different parts of the name. So if the website asks me for my name, then I have to rub my crystal ball to figure out which style the company intends to use.

I know that human Germans have problems with knowing when to "du" someone, so how the hell is a website is supposed to know?

Okay but say a person with an East Asian name fills out your form and dutifully fills out your form with their name in reverse. i.e. if their name is the Chinese equivalent of “Smith John”, they fill it out as given name: John, family name: Smith. Aren’t you going to be rendering their name in the wrong order for all your interactions? How do you know which order to concatenate it?

I think the point is it's a single field so you don't do any concatenation

This. There's two separate concerns: what you call them, and their "official" name.

What you call them is always better done as a separate single field, rather than trying to concatenate the official name fields.

This is why you'd use the single "what do you want to be called?" value (e.g. preferred_name). Then it's not an issue because it's the exact text they provided.

You're mixing up multiple problems. If adding problems is what you want, none of my highschool classmates called each others in the "John" part of anyone's names, and emails beginning with a "Hello $firstname" in my language sounds weird to me anyway. But first/last names are often reused for billing and official purposes, so East Asian(CJK) users would know to fill the "first" with given and "last" with family name if asked that way for official purposes, no matter the visual order or how will it be used. If it's not for official purposes, people are just going to throw in random junks anyway.

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