
Name: Illegitimate - georgecmu
http://caterina.net/archive/001011.html
======
sriramk
FB's email policy is equally braindead. My email address used to be
mail@sriramkrishnan.com - they disallow names like 'mail', 'admin', etc. So I
had to come up with a new alias just for FB.

But I keep getting hit by this in odd ways. Like with the FB+Heroku
integration - I couldn't get FB to accept that my Heroku login was valid
because it was failing the 'Is this a suspicious alias' test.

If someone from FB is watching, you would save me a great deal of annoyance if
you help me get around this.

~~~
craigmccaskill
I'll +1 this, I have the same exact issue.

This is the single most annoying thing about signing up for services. If they
disallow this or the +flag chances are I won't sign up for a service.

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lubutu
This reminds me of Patrick McKenzie's article "Falsehoods Programmers Believe
About Names".

[http://www.kalzumeus.com/2010/06/17/falsehoods-
programmers-b...](http://www.kalzumeus.com/2010/06/17/falsehoods-programmers-
believe-about-names/)

~~~
pwf
If I'm not allowed to assume names fit into the set of Unicode symbols, what
do I use for a name field in my database? An image field? What if a dragon
whose name cannot be printed attempts to sign up for my service?

Someone who decides to identify themselves with Klingon (whether their parents
gave them that name or not) should expect to have an alias ready...

~~~
gloob
Should a Japanese octogenarian whose parents had the poor taste to spell their
child's name with a character that would not make it into Unicode expect the
same problem?

~~~
alanh
What would they enter into _any_ computer system as their name?

~~~
tsuraan
I believe that ISO2022 allows for the full set of japanese names (and has some
sort of process for introducing new kanji). That's probably a big part of the
reason that Ruby's strings are bytes with an encoding attribute, rather than
just being unicode.

~~~
patio11
Ruby was designed as utility goop for Japanese programmers. Inability to
parse/output legacy encodings would have rendered it virtually useless for
that, even if legacy encodings were strictly dominated by any available
Unicode encoding, which many Japanese programmers would hotly contest.

------
postfuturist
Every fraud prevention scheme is going to have false positives, so there's no
excuse for not providing the user with an appeal process.

~~~
c250d07
This blog post is quite old. They do have such an appeal system in place now.

<http://i.imgur.com/xQNvz.jpg>

------
lubujackson
My favorite version of this problem was an old cornerback for the Patriots
named Randall Gay. His friends/family couldn't go to the NFL store to get
custom jersey's made because his last name is "profane".

~~~
mikeryan
I had to look this up its kind of funny the complete list of banned names is
here

<http://outsports.com/nfl/2005/0301nflshopnaughtywords.htm>

There's actually a few in there that could turn up as names. But a lot of
humor in that list. "Flogging the Dolphin" is not allowed on the back of NFL
Jersey's if anyone was thinking of that. (and if Pud is viewing this thread,
don't try getting your nickname on the back of a jersey)

------
Wilya
Since nobody seems to have actually tried it: you will still get blocked.
Though the message has become:

"Our automated system will not approve this name. If you believe this is an
error, please contact us.[0]"

[0] <http://www.facebook.com/help/?faq=212848065405122>

------
maqr
Facebook's naming policy hasn't stopped me from making up comical fake names
for testing. It's pretty absurd to think that any developer is going to make
test posts from their app/project/whatever to their real Facebook account (not
that I have one anyway).

~~~
guelo
A few years ago Facebook banned a fake account that I created for deploying a
Facebook app for the company that I worked at. With the account banned we
couldn't get access to the app to support the tens of thousands of users it
had. Luckily Facebook did end up reinstating the account after we appealed for
a couple weeks, though they did force me to change it to my real name.

~~~
rmc
And this is why your fake account should be used only for testing. You don't
want to block things for your company.

------
ojbyrne
This is from 2006. Is it even still accurate?

~~~
Posibyte
It serves more as a warning than a finger point. Problems like this will
continue to pop up as long as misconceptions exist between what developers
think people do and what people actually do.

~~~
ojbyrne
I guess the first part is fair. But I think there will always be
misconceptions between what programmers initially think, and reality. I'd
actually prefer "simplifications" rather than misconceptions.

Every product I've seen starts out pure, beautiful, etc... Then the edge cases
start getting reported, and pure beautiful code very rapidly gets dragged down
to earth.

You unsimplify code as needed, as exceptions crop up.

------
randallsquared
My first and last names are the same (probably you can guess what they are
without even googling...), and Facebook around 2006 also rejected me. I don't
remember if I emailed them to resolve it or just waited and tried again later.

------
jonah
ESPN has this pretty interesting commercial about having the same name as a
celebrity: <http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=WxBBN3ZnYeU>

~~~
apike
A popular thing to do when you have the same name as a celebrity is go by a
different version of your name. "Mike Jordan", "William Smith", and "Thomas
Jones" sound like plain, common names instead of the names of celebrities.

~~~
barik
Samir: Hmm... well, why don't you just go by Mike instead of Michael?

Michael Bolton: No way! Why should I change? He's the one who sucks.

------
joshmlewis
I love how this came out of the Null threads comments. EDIT: link
<http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=3900727>

------
Bobby_Tables
Ok, now I don't feel so bad about having worked on a system that was
confounded by people having the letter ñ in their name. (Surprisingly, it had
no problem with someone else whose middle initial is the number 8.)

~~~
mmastrac
Jennifer 8 Lee?

<http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Jennifer_8._Lee>

~~~
orbitingpluto
Well that's one way for your child to avoid jail time or fillibuster on the
floor.

Please state your name for the record:

"Bob _Pi_ BlahBlah"

------
ctdonath
Once I entered my town name of "Cumming" on a web page, and it objected with
"my, what colorful language."

~~~
paulschreiber
Years ago, the University of Waterloo licensed technology from Ask Jeeves for
"Ask the Warrior." (The Warrior is the name of the school's athletic teams.)
This site was targeted at prospective students, who could ask basic questions
such as "how many students are in the Math faculty?"

However, if you Asked the Warrior what "concordia com veritate" (the
university's motto) meant, it told you not to use dirty words.

~~~
derleth
> "concordia com veritate"

cum, not com.

I wouldn't bother except the story doesn't work if you change that vowel.

('Cum' is Latin for 'with'; "concordia cum veritate" means "In harmony with
truth", which the search program was not.)

------
reso
This is from 2006. I'm sure their fake name detection is much more
sophisticated by now.

~~~
chris_wot
As sophisticated as their gender dropdown, which only includes "Male" and
"Female". I just tried to register Chris Fake, and it tells me:

"Our automated system will not approve this name. If you believe this is an
error, please contact us."

At least they let folks contact them now, I guess.

~~~
uptown
Is there some other gender I'm unaware of?

~~~
derleth
There are people who don't identify with a gender and aren't going to be
included in any list of them you'll be able to come up with.

Don't bother saying "What if I check between their legs?" or anything like
that, because gender and sex are two different things that are merely strongly
correlated in most people.

~~~
uptown
I think it's a stretch to say that physiology plays no role in defining
gender. Say the gender drop-down is being used on WebMD to present
biologically-relevant information for someone ... then the gender drop-down
helps to identify what physiological issues the user's body is likely to
experience.

~~~
rmc
Well what if someone is trans gendered? What about a trans women who hasn't
changed her birth cert, but has gotten a sex reassignment surgery (i.e. has a
vagina now, no testicles) and has been taking female hormones for years? What
should they put down? They are probably more likely to have female medical
problems than male.

~~~
uptown
Then they should choose whatever is most applicable to their special-case. And
really they're unlikely to have female problems given that while body parts
are shaped into something resembling the other gender, they don't truly have
functional versions of these body parts in the traditional sense. A man that
becomes a woman doesn't ovulate or cannot become pregnant for instance.

Look, EVERY website is built based on some assumptions. Sometimes it's that
people comprehend a certain language. Sometimes it's that they're using a
browser with support for images and they're not using LYNX. The general
assumption of most websites is that their user hasn't changed their gender ...
and while I'm sure there's some equal-rights group that would disagree with
me, I think that's a fair assumption. I'd also bet that for the vast majority
of sites that request gender information, that input is unlikely to ever have
an impact on the user's experience on that site.

If a user has transformed their identity, then I think they've also taken on
the responsibility of figuring out how that new identity will navigate the
real-world. That means a woman that identifies as a man can enter "Male" in a
gender drop-down if that's how they choose to self-identify, but unless
they've had a surgical procedure to change their physiology, then they're
still going to need to operate their body like any other woman would. If
they're in a pharmacy, that means buying feminine products to maintain their
body. If they're on WebMD, that may mean declaring themselves as a woman to
get relevant content. If they're on a dating site, maybe it makes sense to
declare themselves as a man ... much to the potential future chagrin of their
date.

~~~
rmc
Yep, lots of things are based on assumptions, but one should also look at your
audience. E.g. an endocrinologist (hormone doctor) will probably see a large
percentage of trans patients.

~~~
uptown
If that's their target audience, wouldn't it stand to reason that their gender
drop-down would support an expanded set of options?

------
dionidium
It's quite often the case that things that seem braindead just don't matter.
That is, if this practice blocks a lot of illegitimate accounts, then the only
person who cares that it happens to block yours too is you. I'm not defending
the practice, I'm just saying there's no money in accommodating edge cases.

Nearly every complaint about crappy customer service ignores that large
companies don't have much incentive to improve at the margins.

~~~
guard-of-terra
Does this sound anti-free market and pro-regulation?

Because I can totally imagine how a lawsuit can suddenly incentivise them.

------
AncientPC
While we're on the topic of poor programmer assumptions, here's a problem a
developer ran into with his family tree software when it turned out there was
a cycle in a user's tree (father had children with his daughters):

[http://stackoverflow.com/questions/6163683/cycles-in-
family-...](http://stackoverflow.com/questions/6163683/cycles-in-family-tree-
software)

------
mhartl
Since no one else seems to have noted it: the OP is not just a Fake, she's a
_famous_ Fake: <http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Caterina_Fake> You'd think the
cofounder of Flickr would be treated with more respect by a computer...

------
chris_wot
Man - if they were going to exclude a surname, they could at least _research_
it first, surely? After 5 minutes Google search, I found the following:

<http://www.surnamedb.com/Surname/Fake>

------
TazeTSchnitzel
Null is a name, Fake is a name, almost anything could be. Don't make
assumptions.

------
Mz
A friend told me that her programmer husband once used the cat's name to test
a system he was working on. They soon had credit card offers for the cat. Yet,
like this lady and others here, I recently ran up against frustration I can't
seem to fix when a brand new account was deleted.

I used to naively think my name issues were limited to people being unable to
spell or pronounce my names. But, no, it gets betterer.

~~~
evincarofautumn
Your story reminds me of Sal Esposito of Boston, who was summoned for jury
duty despite the problematic fact of being a housecat.

~~~
Mz
My ex husband was a "jr." I still get credit card offers for my first name
last name jr. I also once had a really nutty phone discussion with a marketer
where I tried to flippantly make the point that I can't be a junior since I
got married and thus no longer have the same last name as my mother. They
didn't seem to get it.

I thought I would escape my name issues by marrying. No dice. I thought I
would escape them by going by my more common middle name. It doesn't help as
much as I hoped. It's like a curse.

But at least I don't own a cat.

~~~
toddkaufmann
You need to have a daughter and name her the same. Then you can be II.

And she can be Jr. III

~~~
evincarofautumn
Glad you brought that up—my father is a third, and my mother didn’t change her
name when they married, so they both have their share of name-handling issues.
Makes me almost glad to be boring old Jon W. Purdy.

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HaloZero
I own Ivan Ooze and Rita Repulsa facebook accounts. Apparently ooze is fine
for a last name

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zerostar07
Anybody surprised that she doesn't use yahoo mail?

