
Quora has blocked me because it doesn't think Theodore Ts'o is my real name - dredmorbius
https://plus.google.com/+TheodoreTso/posts/PbQaudyHmzj
======
seiryuz
Oh boy, Indonesian here, I only have one name (No last name). Websites that
require me to have both first name and last name are the bane of my existence.

Quora also blocked me, despite me sending an email to their appeal division
with a copy of my ID. In the end I gave up fighting for it.

~~~
gbog
Yes, I had this issue when working for some administrative software, and other
problems like what date of birth do you input for the many people which have
unknown date of birth? I have also seen many handwritten "identification
papers" which you'd have very hard time deciphering anything from it with some
degree of certainty.

We believe our times are more free than past times, but that's only partially
true. In some places and in some past periods, people did not have
"identification papers" and could still travel the worlds and cross borders
(minus the slowness and danger of old times travels).

~~~
cyberferret
Yep, I used to do a lot of work for indigenous communities, designing
databases and the like. I was amazed to discover that something like a known
date of birth was a rarity, especially amongst the Aboriginal elders. No birth
certificates. Usually the data was obtained from other family members, purely
from memory or based on other events around the same time.

In a lot of cases, only the year was known. If you were lucky, the month as
well. We had to strip out all the DATE data types from our database because
the validations were constantly failing, or we would have an inordinate number
of people born on the 1st of January on a given year. We had to split the date
fields out into three separate drop downs, each with a '(unknown)' option so
that validation and statistical reporting would be meaningful.

~~~
sergers
my mom was born in india in the sixties. she didnt get a birth certificate
till ~4 years after she was born

she immigrated to canada, and her passport/license/citizen hip in canada
reflect the date of the birth certificate.

wrong month, wrong day, wrong year.

funny thing is her cousin was born 3 years after and immigrated to canada, he
was born in a major city in india and in a hospital, so had a birth cert at
time time of birth.

he is older according to canadian govt issued IDs, yet my mom has pictures of
herself holding him when he was a new born.

we celebrate both of my moms birthdates, one on May 3rd (family recollection
in relation to historical event) of her real birthday, and July 8th according
to her govt issued IDs

------
overgard
I'm always amazed by the lack of historical perspective that "real name"
policies entail. Like, holy shit, how many historical people used pseudonyms
well before the internet because impactful speech can be a very dangerous
thing to the speaker. And yes I know you can be anonymous on Quora, but that's
only useful if you trust that no government entities can lean on Quora for
information. (HINT: shouldn't trust that).

Just let people run with the identities they choose. There's nothing special
about a name.

~~~
pix64
The solution is to choose a "normal" pseudonym.

~~~
bambax
Exactly. I use Quora very rarely but every time I choose a plain fake name and
it has always worked with zero hassle.

(I need a new one because many times I don't remember the other one or the
password associated with it).

The only thing "real name policies" do is annoy people with unusual names;
they can't do anything against people using fake names on purpose.

~~~
bunderbunder
I don't think they're designed to dissuade people from deliberately using fake
names.

They're designed to encourage people who causally use pseudonyms just for the
fun of it to use their real name instead. The reason for that is just to have
a better identification key to use when selling access to your data to
advertisers.

To put it bluntly, most these companies probably don't have any reason care if
that process also makes their service a PITA for people who don't have names
like Bob Smith. With very high probability, those people don't live in
countries their customers are trying to target with ads.

I just really can't buy that real name policies are meant to dissuade abuse.
Not when you've got so many cases like Milo Yiannopulos being allowed to get
away with chasing women all around the Internet under his real name, in
accordance with real name policies, for such a long time.

------
stormy
Unless their policy has changed, it's a temporary restriction of the account
until the user helps work with a mod to verify the name.

Happened to me way back in 2010, because my real name sounds terribly fake:
Stormy Shippy

~~~
parennoob
I don't know about Quora's "work with a mod to verify the name" policy works,
but I have heard from at least one friend that Facebook makes you give them a
scan your driving license or other Government ID in order to show that your
slightly unusual name is actually what you say it is.

Which is just absurd. A random social network should _never_ be so powerful as
to demand your Government-issued IDs for some bogus "real name" policy that
penalizes names like Theodore Ts'o in favor of "normal" ones like John Smith.
The day Facebook asks me for one is the day I'm done with it. Same for Quora
if their policy is similar.

~~~
5555624
In the US, As long as "other Government ID" is not an actual Government ID.
Scanning/photocopying is a violation of Title 18, US Code Part I, Chapter 33,
Section 701. While there evidently are exceptions for government agencies
performing official business, Facebook is not a government agency.

~~~
ChoHag
Is it a crime to require that a person commits a crime before being admitted
into a private club?

~~~
walshemj
Yes obviously

------
franciscop
As a Spaniard, I have 3-word first name and 2 family names. No middle name.
Now shove that into a non-space-enabled, 2 inputs web form. For plane tickets
which basically could leave me stranded in any country.

I normally get some trouble trying to retrieve them in the airport in those
auto-check-in machines that are being deployed all around Asia. I mean, they
can spend thousands of dollars in those machines but don't care about
correctly accepting a name. Then the person helping there tries again the
same; finally she redirects me to the counter.

I have give up and just go by my first-word first name and fist family name to
handle things easily (which _is_ a bit disrespectful for my mother's family).

~~~
thaumasiotes
This is particularly odd because multi-word last names aren't exactly obscure
in the US. Here are some famous people: van der Waals, von Neumann, de Soto,
van Gogh, da Vinci...

We have a sizable Italian community domestically, too, plus lots of history of
Dutch and German settlement.

And then we have lots of Mexicans, who, intuitively enough, use the Spanish
system of double surnames. But somehow they all get shoehorned into
hyphenation.

~~~
raarts
Where is that? Dutch so I'm interested.

~~~
gpvos
The USA. People of German descent are, at least historically, the largest
population group.

~~~
danieltillett
Actually people of English decent are the largest - Germans are second.

~~~
gpvos
It depends a bit on the source, or how you count, apparently.

------
joelthelion
Quora has been completely ruined by dogmatic Silicon Valley thinking and poor
monetization attempts.

Content cloaking, removal of the credit system, deliberate choice to promote
crappy clickbaity answers as opposed to quality ones, aggressive question
length limits...

I think there is definitely space for someone to recreate the original Quora
without the delusions of grandeur. A place for people to exchange questions
and answers on any topic, without misguided attempts to remove "bad"
questions, whatever that means.

~~~
michalu
StackExchange? Btw. same here, I used it before it reached it's first million
users, even went to few Quora meetups but I blocked the site on notebook two
years ago. I feel it became a place for chronic procrastinators and self-
promoters + there's very little unique knowledge... as a content researcher,
99 out of 100 I find better information elsewhere.

~~~
littleweep
Just curious, where do you go the other 99 times?

~~~
dredmorbius
Not OP, but I've increasingly been searching within published papers and books
for information.

Rather than rely on Internet re-tellings (sometimes reliable, sometimes not)
of what's in such references, got to the source.

The availability of technical articles and books through (extralegal) services
such as SciHub and LibGen means that the _quality_ of information online has
increased greatly. Not that articles and books are always valid, but they tend
to have a lower bullshit level.

If you're into older sources (1924 and prior, some after), The Internet
Archive and Project Gutenberg, as well as other archival sites, have a wealth
of information.

Google's Ngram Viewer is an amazing way to trace the emergence of specific
terms (and occasionally names). I'll often start my search from Ngram Viewer,
find an _early_ period of pre-emergence of a key phrase, and look for first
instances of mention. For technical papers, further drilling down to
references can turn up first instances. I've used this successfully numerous
times to track down idea origins (or near-origins), examples being the
concepts of money as based on energy (Frederick Soddy -> H.G. Wells -> A.C.
Clarke -> Kim Stanley Robinson), or the modern misapprehensions of Adam
Smith's "invisible hand" metaphor (Jacob Viner -> Paul Samuelson ->
FEE/Leonard Read -> Regnery Press -> von Mises/Rothbardian Libertarianism ->
General popular use ~mid 1960s).

Wikipedia can be useful, though you want to rely on its references section for
verification. Reddit's "Ask" subs (Science & Historians) can be useful. For
programming / inforamtion technology technical info, StackExchange is pretty
good.

~~~
littleweep
Interesting, thanks

------
protomyth
I should get a couple of people from around here (Native American reservation)
to sign up and see how messy their policy is.

If you cannot validate names, then you probably should not use a real name
policy. It bad enough Facebook (and I guess Quora) causes people pain, don't
add your own wounds.

~~~
dawnerd
Facebook's policy is so weird. I have a ton of older test accounts that
literally include TEST and other such very obvious fake text in the name.

~~~
lucaspiller
Just need to name your kids Testy McTest. Problem solved!

------
evilzombie
A while ago I asked my GP to change my title of address from "Mr" to "Ms". It
turns out whatever system the NHS (or possibly just my GP's surgery) uses to
keep their records absolutely didn't expect _that_ and has no provision to
handle it.

I bet it's perfectly possible to change from "Ms" to "Mrs" or even from "Mr"
to "Fr" or "Dr" but try to go from "Mr" to "Ms" and the whole thing HCFs. So
there's now two records for me in the NHS database one for a "Mr" me and one
for a "Ms" me.

It's confusing for medical peeps who need to access my records and could
potentially lead to some humiliation for me (though usually people tend to
assume there's some error in the system and don't pry any further).

I've done the same thing with my bank and there was no trouble at all. It's
just the NHS so far.

On the plus side if I could spawn a few such doppelganger records I might even
get some protection against people gathering "metadata" on myself.

~~~
dmca
The NHS (or at least my GP's surgery) does not allow you to register as "Dr"
and I wouldn't be surprised if they lacked a mechanism to change from "Ms" to
"Mrs" (or any ability at all to change the title field).

I suspect they used to use title as a proxy for gender but this wouldn't be
very sensible so maybe it's just there for historical purposes or no
particular reason.

------
ajmurmann
Obligatory link to Patio11's gem of an article about this:
[https://www.kalzumeus.com/2010/06/17/falsehoods-
programmers-...](https://www.kalzumeus.com/2010/06/17/falsehoods-programmers-
believe-about-names/)

Edit: phone typo

~~~
tedmiston
The only feasible way to handle a name given that, at least what I can think
of, is a single unbounded textbox that's also optional.

Actually, I guess it really must be a foreign key M{0,}:N as a many-to-many to
allow for having multiple names.

~~~
lucaspiller
If you require users to divulge their real name (i.e. financial institutions),
it's probably a better idea to have two fields:

\- Your legal name

\- What you'd like us to call you

~~~
dingaling
> Your legal name

The UK for one doesn't have the concept of a legal name. As an adult you can
call yourself anything you like, as often as you like.

You can complete a deed poll document to change your name on official
documents, but it doesn't 'make legal' your new name, it just officially
states that your new name supercedes your old name.

[https://www.gov.uk/change-name-deed-poll/overview](https://www.gov.uk/change-
name-deed-poll/overview)

 _“I [old name] of [your address] have given up my name [old name] and have
adopted for all purposes the name [new name]._

"If the individual changing their name so wishes, evidence of a change of name
(forename and/or surname) may be provided by a procedure known as deed poll."

------
emsy
It baffles me that Quora is so successful despite their closed approach. You
can't use a pseudonym and can't see questions unless you login (there are
workarounds, but I'm talking about normal users). They also seemingly block
archive.org from archiving their content. Stack Exchange on the other hand has
none of these drawbacks.

~~~
manojlds
You cannot compare Quora and Stack Exchange. Quora thrives on stupid questions
that really don't have a well defined answer.

~~~
enraged_camel
I don't think it's fair to qualify the questions as "stupid," unless you want
to make the argument that every subjective question with a qualitative answer
is stupid.

The two communities are vastly different and serve different purposes. It's
really as simple as that.

~~~
manojlds
I am not saying ALL the questions there are stupid. I am saying that Quora
exists because it allows such questions to be promoted.

------
evilzombie
Come to think of it, why do first/middle/last names need separate fields in a
database, in terms of bookkeeping?

Why do I absolutely _need_ to be filed as [Ms] [Evil] [Z.] [Ombie]? Wouldn't
[Ms Evil Z. Ombie] do?

I don't even see how a family name relates you to your own parents when it's
very likely there may be a few thousands, even millions of people with your
last name, and even with your own combination of two or three names.

Does it make any difference when someone is searching for you if they do a
search for [Mr] [John] [Smith], rather than a [Mr John Smith]? It's only a
combination of name and address that can (at best hope) to disambiguate two
people with the exact same name and there's no reason to try and do that in a
field-by-field manner. If you can match one string without spaces you can
match n strings with n-1 spaces right?

In fact why do we absolutely need more than one line for a full address? That
just causes more problems than it solves, doesn't it?

~~~
Theodores
Recently I split some forms out from 'name' to 'firstname' and 'lastname'. An
extra column was added to the backend table too.

So why did I do this, go from what you want to something else? What was the
evil marketing intent?

Those names also get used by other systems, therefore to create a support
ticket in 3rd party system, extra name needed. There is also the small matter
of writing back to whomever filled in the form. 'Dear Steve, thanks for
applying for the position of blah blah...' becomes possible.

The backend form handling is there to build a tidy database so extra fettling
goes on. Customer enters 'steve mcdonald' in the 'name' field, but when you
email them their tickets you would prefer to have the name as 'Steve
McDonald'. Note the titlecasing going on there and the tidying of whitespace.
This is a snip if using two fields, a bit more complex otherwise.

Doing this makes it easier when it comes to customer enquiries, the name is
the same in the sales order table, the customer database, the newsletter
system somewhere in the cloud and in the helpdesk system. Simple.

Also important to the change was the reality of how web forms work. You can
get autofill to do a good job of 'firstname' and 'lastname', it is all there
to be clicked 'submit' to if the form autofill helpers are configured
correctly in a HTML5 way.

Sometimes the Mr/Mrs option is helpful as you instantly get people's gender.
That is why the Mr/Mrs box is there.

Personally I do not put Mr/Mrs in forms, instead I use the 'gender' library to
guess the customer's gender based on their IP address (country) and their
first name. In this mini-'shadow profile' the gender guess is not disclosed to
the customer but it does get pulled through to the reports and the inaccuracy
of not knowing whether 'Viv' is a girl or a boy does not matter in the
aggregate.

So there you have it, why an 'evolved web form' can move away from a 'name'
box to 'firstname' and 'lastname'.

~~~
gpvos
Why do companies want to know my gender at all? I am offended anytime some
form asks me for it, often even making the field mandatory. It is seldom
relevant to my relation with the company.

~~~
mixedCase
Advertisement purposes.

~~~
gpvos
Well, that's _their_ problem. If they offload it on me, I will be much less
inclined to complete the form/purchase/etc.

------
ndesaulniers
Ted is a long time Linux kernel hacker. [0]
[https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Theodore_Ts%27o](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Theodore_Ts%27o)

~~~
slowmovintarget
Which explains Linus Torvalds' comment:

    
    
      To me, you'll always just be "tytso"

------
id122015
that is why its better to use a fake name anyway. Anywhere. Its been a long
time since Quora is dominated by Political Correctness. It seems like
democracy is screwed, wherever leftists are allowed to vote, they vote against
Science. See for example YouTube Be a Hero and Censor Free Speech.

Why dont more of us contribute to software immune to censorship ?

~~~
braythwayt
Tragedy of the Commons.

Unfettered free speech is incredibly powerful as long as the preponderance of
the community respects it and self-polices. But if such a community grows,
over time some selfish actors appear who start gaming the system in a way that
makes the community worse for everybody else.

That sets up an incentive to either join inthe gaming or leave, and left
unchecked, the community devolves into a smaller core of people being awful
and everyone else having decamped either to a newer community that hasn’t been
spoiled yet, or to a community that has moderation a/k/a censorship.

Note that we are having this conversation on a platform that has, from the
beginning, chosen to moderate speech.

------
M_Grey
Meanwhile they love me and my fake, but entirely "normal" name. _smh_

------
timothyfcook
Sounds like a product manager didn't properly define the acceptance criteria
for the validation on their name fields. Name validations often tend to be
overly strict and, in some cases, slightly racist/ethnocentric.

------
whywhywhywhy
Still don't understand why this site has any respect, they just spammed Google
results then locked the answers behind a sign up wall to build their userbase.

------
yuhong
I dislike real name policies, but I aim for the problems with using real names
(aka being non-anonymous) to be fixed if possible.﻿

~~~
hiou
That it looks real to their customers(advertisers) is all that matters.

------
SNvD7vEJ
Quora's "real name policy" is just moronic.

The thing is that Quora doesn't care at all if the name is real or not. What
is important for them is that the name _looks_ real.

They think this policy (where people are making up fake but plausible names)
makes the site seem more credible...

And this is what they now have accomplished, a site populated by millions of
subscribers with plausible but fake names.

It also means that you are less likely to tell if a poster is using a
pseudonym or their real name.

I think it is perfectly ok to use pseudonyms in this type of communities. And
allowing pseudonyms does NOT result in more spam or trolling since a fake name
is as easy to create.

When I use a pseudonym I very much would like to be able to signal to other
users the fact that it is a pseudonym, easiest done by purposely using an id
that is obviously NOT a real name. That is just sensible courtesy to other
users, and what you would expect from other users.

But Quora have chosen to force people to instead use fake names.

------
mancerayder
I was a sysadmin a while back and a user's last name was literally O.

It was an effort to get the back end systems to tolerate that!

------
catalinbraescu
I was banned by Quora for not agreeing to repeated edits to MY OWN question.
Reason? VANDALISM. Mind boggling.

~~~
dredmorbius
That's a whole 'nother can of worms concerning participation /
nonparticipation elections by various services.

And the question of when a service ought / ought not allow participation.

I'm strongly in the camp of controlling my own personal online interactions.
Which is somewhat curious in the case of HN as that's not possible -- there
are no user blocks. HN's moderation policies _and practices_ ensure that this
is virtually never necessary.

However I've got issues with how and why various online services draw the line
at participation. I agree with some of the groups banned from Reddit, for
example. I take exception to Imzy's banning my account (largely for being
hounded, misrepresented, and harassed by others on the service). I'm
exceptionally critical of Google, _on_ Google+, but that's not resulted in
repercussions (there are times when an adversary's belief in "the marketplace
of ideas" is an advantage).

I'd prefer a world in which relying on access to other's soapboxes and spaces
wasn't so necessary.

------
Sevrene
Stilgherrian[1], a technology journalist and commentator from Australia has
had issues with this, particularly the Google Plus name policy. He changed his
name to his online handle because that's simply what everyone called him.

If I'm designing regular expression to parse a phone number, I make sure that
it works on ALL valid phone numbers for the regions required. The same should
be done for name policies that are used worldwide, to me it's actually insane
and such a huge drawback; banning or blocking users because their name is
abnormal yet valid, in the quest of what, removing trolling?

1\. [https://stilgherrian.com/category/only-one-
name/](https://stilgherrian.com/category/only-one-name/)

------
aq3cn
Oh God, another blow to end anonymity. This is sad.

I still have a way to remain anonymous which is to only give my first name.
There are already thousands of people with my name, so I feel protected in
crowd.

Do you think this will cause a ban?

~~~
mixedCase
> Do you think this will cause a ban?

Much like everything, only if they find out. To get an anonymous experience in
these websites you'll have to assume a fake identity.

------
jrockway
I don't understand Real Names. If your parents give you a silly name, that's
fine, but if you give yourself a silly name, that's not fine?

------
psankar
Quora has blocked me too. For Tamils there is no last name but the idiots
running quora insist that everyone should have a lastname.
[http://psankar.blogspot.in/2015/01/naming-policy-
deactivated...](http://psankar.blogspot.in/2015/01/naming-policy-deactivated-
quora-account.html?q=quora)

~~~
speeder
King of Greece has no surname.

People insist in demanding surname, not just for real reasons, but to actually
spite him.

Greece even made a law after the king was deposed making surnames mandatory
(and then promptly declared the guy noncitizen for illegally not having one)

~~~
pvaldes
In Spain only members of the king family can have more than two first names,
by law.

------
tedmiston
At this point we (most or all programmers) can't actually successfully
validate names or email addresses, or perhaps even phone numbers globally
without mistake. Perhaps it's time to just become lax on "cosmetic"
validation.

------
aestetix
I did a talk on this topic at Harvard a couple years ago:
[https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=6iprHlKR6Eo](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=6iprHlKR6Eo)

------
morecoffee
Real name policies would probably be a lot more accurate if they let the
people who know you pick it. Arguably, your name is more for other people than
for yourself.

------
the_duke
The most surprising thing about this is that people actually use Google Plus.

------
denzell
I got blacklisted because my name is the same as a baseball pitchers name..

------
sireat
Are only real names allowed on Quora?

Seems like a silly restriction on Quora.

I signed up to Quora with a fake name a few years ago.

After lurking for a while I have started to answer some questions in my area
of expertise and get some A2A(asked to answer) sent my way.

So should I just forget about answering questions with my fake name?

------
innocentoldguy
Quora sucks. Well, I guess it is OK, if you like a sterile community, where
contrary opinions and rational thought are smoothed and sanitized for easy and
spineless consumption.

~~~
thewhitetulip
Yes and where only the elite get the upvotes even if they write a factually
incorrect and laughable answer. Too much for being a "community"

------
samblr
It is indeed sad to hear quora policing

------
tove
Yeah, it happened to me too with a lot of names. :P

