

Your last name contains invalid characters - jgrahamc
http://blog.jgc.org/2010/06/your-last-name-contains-invalid.html

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patio11
I started writing a comment on this but it got _very_ long, so here:

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

~~~
stevoski
Good article, Patrick. It is so easy to say "oh, those stupid/lazy/naive web-
form programmers". But actually this is a fiendish problem to solve correctly
- as your article demonstrates.

~~~
oconnore
True, but accepting, say, 1-1000 arbitrary Unicode characters is a step in the
right direction.

~~~
pjscott
And that's probably the best trade-off between correctness and complexity.

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CWuestefeld
Two experiences:

1\. A web site that demands your mother's maiden name for a security
verification question. Of course, that's ridiculously insecure, so I entered
my wife's mother's maiden name instead. It turns out that it won't accept
names less than 4 letters -- which excludes a very large portion of those of
Chinese descent.

2\. New Jersey has all kinds of regulations governing your identity
authentication when you go to renew your driver's license. If your current
license mis-matches your documents, you _really_ have to jump through hoops.
My problems is that my first name is "Christopher" -- a common enough name --
which is too long to fit in their system's 10-character field. So they only
put on my license "C S Wuestefeld", meaning that my name mismatches, ensuring
that I'll _always_ have a mismatch, and be subject to their extra
verifications.

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d_r
Whenever possible, I just enter a randomly generated password for those
ridiculous "security question" fields. Isn't "your first job" or "your
hometown" easily discoverable via my Facebook profile?

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lotharbot
Right - the security questions are just a secondary verification method. I
simply fill them in with a secondary password.

This does occasionally lead to hilarity when I have to do business over the
phone, and they want to use those questions to verify my identity. "What town
did you honeymoon in?" "P7qkn1~f"

~~~
pjscott
Situations like that are exactly why I try to avoid using the "~" character in
strings that anybody else might have to type in. A lot of people have no idea
what "tilde" means, or where the ~ key is located. The same problem crops up
with ampersands, carets, and "#", for which nobody can seem to agree on a
name.

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mjtokelly
Almost as bad is accepting my name without complaint, but then rendering it as
O%27Kelly for years. (I'm looking at you, Amazon.)

~~~
tinotopia
Amazon handles my apostrophe without drama. One advantage to having an
apostrophe in your name is that you can spot when people migrate their
databases without paying attention, because the apostrophes tend to double
each time. DirecTV is now sending my bill to a Mr. D''''''A…

Some systems will manage to accept the apostrophe properly, and then make life
difficult by making up the collation as they go along.

At least 80% of the time someone tries to look me up in an alphabetical list,
I have to try to convince them that _no_ , I really am on the list, but that I
might be found at the very beginning of the Ds, at the very end of the Ds, in
the Ds where I'd be with no apostrophe (depending on how they handle
alphabetization of punctuation), or at the top of the Fs (middle initial) or
in the As (on lists where the D has been interpreted to be an extra middle
initial).

Even better, I often wind up on these lists several times when someone decides
that it's easier to enter all my information again rather than look for it in
one or two more places.

Credit-card name verification seems to be a bit smarter; every credit card I
have has a different variant of my name on it (and a lot of credit-card forms
consider an apostrophe 'invalid' in a name even though there's one on my
business Visa card), but I've never had a charge rejected because the name was
not an exact match.

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greyboy
Best comment from the post:

    
    
      Change your name. Not that big of a deal.

~~~
nasalter
It echoes Steve Jobs: [http://www.wired.com/gadgetlab/2009/11/steve-jobs-to-
develop...](http://www.wired.com/gadgetlab/2009/11/steve-jobs-to-developer-
name-change-not-that-big-of-a-deal/)

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wlievens
We got the joke all by ourselves, thanks.

~~~
dhyasama
Actually, I didn't get the joke so the link was helpful. Thanks, nasalter.

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techiferous
Reminds me of those websites that force you to have a password that conforms
to their overly-specific rules. Here is a real example:

    
    
      Passwords must be 8 to 12 characters long composed of the following character types:
    
      Uppercase Alpha (A, B, C, etc.)
      Lowercase Alpha (a, b, c, etc.)
      Numeric (1, 2, 3, etc.) or the following Special Characters (!, @, #, $,*, +,-)
      Each password must contain UPPERCASE AND LOWERCASE ALPHA CHARACTERS, and at least one character that is either a Numeric or a Special Character.
    

So if your password is 13 characters long, it doesn't work. Or if it has
letters, numbers and punctuation but no uppercase letters, it doesn't work.

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joshfinnie
Or even worse, accept your 13 character long password and just truncate it at
12. Therefore the next time you sign in your password is invaild and you have
no idea why!

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chris_j
That's awesome :-)

I had a similar experience. I'm based in the UK so I have my computer set up
to use a UK keyboard layout. One time, I decided to use the # symbol in my
Windows password. The next time I tried to log in to Windows, my password was
rejected. I eventually discovered that Windows was using a US keyboard layout
until I logged in, meaning that # was in a completely different location on
the keyboard and I was typing a completely different character. Of course,
there's no option to actually see your password while you type it so it took
me a long time to realise that I had to type shift-3 to get that character.
I'm used to getting £ when I hit shift-3, that being the pound sign that we
user over here.

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PaddyCorry
My first name is Patrick, but I go by Paddy, which is a common enough name in
Ireland. When I initially signed up for a hotmail account (around 1997/98) I
got a message telling me my name was a racially offensive term (or words to
that effect). I found it quite funny at the time, so in the end I just
registered as 'Patrick' and didn't use paddy in my email address. (No such
problems with gmail, which I use now)

~~~
jgrahamc
Years ago I tried to get a Hotmail account with my real name and had the same
experience because of Cumming. Instead I signed up for a Hotmail address with
the name Ivana Watch-Teens-Give-Head.

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patio11
People who think _any_ non-trivial subset of a human language can be rendered
inoffensive are fooling themselves.

Here, obscenity with a first grade vocabulary and Disney characters:

I just saw Mickey and Minnie getting Goofy with Pluto.

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chc
A lot of people really would find that sentence less offensive than "I jacked
off in the shower" or "Fuck, you're awesome" simply due to the more decorous
phrasing. The fact that your example describes bestiality and my second
example is actually an ecstatic compliment doesn't matter to such people — the
phrasing itself is what offends them, not the content of the idea.

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d_r
As a developer, I'm wondering if there is ever any legitimate reason for this.
Is it the laziness of properly escaping inputs on the part of the developer?
Complying with some standard? Integrating with a legacy system?

My favorite part is when I'm not allowed to use a special character in my
password.

It is still a good idea to strip leading/trailing spaces, however. Users may
inadvertently include a space when copy and pasting, and some less computer-
savvy ones may just include one by accident.

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pierrefar
I stopped counting the number of times I called up banks in the UK to give
them grief over their "security". My favourite pet peeve is the Mastercard
SecureID and Secured by Visa. Both allow only a few characters with just
letters and numbers. I get furious that my very secure passwords are not
allowed.

One bank blamed the system, saying the reason it's doing it this way is
because it's "American".

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hellweaver666
My bank insists on a five digit numeric pin to login to the online banking.
FIVE NUMBERS EXACTLY. I mean... seriously, WTF?

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jrockway
But you get locked out forever after three tries. Consider the PIN to be a
convenient way to not have to call the helpdesk every time you want to access
your account, not as a key used to secure your data for eternity.

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rbanffy
Welcome to my world. I have mostly given up of writing "Bánffy" in web forms.
I have even given up on pronouncing it right, as nobody in Brazil (except
Hungarian expats) can do it in a non-painful - for me to hear - way.

Well... At least your name is valid ASCII... Once entered, it won't be mangled
at the database layer.

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miri
I was just about to say this, too. I've ended up just splitting up the letter
æ in my last name into a and e. Even some Norwegian businesses end up mangling
my name, which is really very embarrassing. For them, that is. Æ, Ø, and Å
aren't considered ligatures, they're considered separate characters in our
alphabet. Worth taking the time not to mangle them, since they're fairly
common in names :P

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henrikschroder
+1 for wishing you had a name in ASCII only. :-/ My last name is Schröder,
which some systems can't handle, some systems transcribe to Schroeder, some
systems make it Schroder, and some systems handle perfectly. I'm always
slightly nervous when booking flight tickets abroad, because there's always
some mismatch between what's in my passport, what's in the booking, and what's
on my credit card, etc.

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frou_dh
I got pissed off with having a home address that different organisations
insisted on putting their own spin on, so I can imagine how frustrating it
must be when it's your actual name!

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henrikschroder
Oh, my home address has a "ö" in it as well, and that's also very hard to
handle correctly everywhere, but addresses are pretty resilient, if you get my
street name wrong on a letter to me, it will most probably be delivered
anyway.

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Tichy
These things are especially hard to endure for developers, because they are so
obviously stupid. I have two umlauts in my name, basically my name is
completely unsuitable for the 21st century.

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asmosoinio
My wife an I, when deciding name for our son, immediately skipped all names
with "ä", which is quite common in Finnish names.

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dagw
Yea, I did the same thing. Name must contain only ASCII characters and must be
easily pronounceable in English where two of my requirements when naming my
daughter.

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jrockway
As a native speaker of English from the US, my goal is to do the opposite :)

~~~
Tichy
Why? Believe me, it is not fun if your name is incompatible with computer
systems.

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vanschelven
Counterpoint:

[http://www.codingthewheel.com/archives/radioactive-search-
ha...](http://www.codingthewheel.com/archives/radioactive-search-hardened-
user-name-for-online-poker)

Describes how a certain player "ROB CASHFLOW" made himself "unsearchable" by
including 0x001F between the B and C of his name.

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unfletch
I know a woman whose last name is Null. I remember her telling stories of
frequent failed form validation years ago (for failing to enter a last name,
of course). I wonder if it's gotten any better as the web has matured.

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andrewtj
I've found having a hyphenated surname and an email address that ends in
".id.au" quite beneficial in determining how much thought a company has put
into their computer systems.

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Maciek416
I've got a name fairly unfamiliar to many speakers of English, ("Maciej", or
"Maciek" in the everyday diminutive form). There aren't any invalid characters
in it, but I have on several occasions had it re-written or transcribed by a
human being after I've entered it into a form on a website, often to something
completely different or garbled (with the implication that I spelled my own
name wrong). In particular, my bank did this to me and for about a year and a
half I was receiving statements addressed to a "Macie J", where someone had
clearly thought the J was part of my middle name (which itself is another
tongue twister to English-speaking folks).

No wonder so many immigrants to Canada and the US change their names :)

~~~
robin_reala
Happens to everyone. I’ve got a friend called Marc, but inevitably he gets
entered on forms as Mark Withersea. Should have learnt by now not to give his
name as Marc-with-a-'c' I guess :)

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ryanelkins
This wasn't really about the fact that it wouldn't accept his name but about
the message it gave him, which to me is a problem of letting developers write
error messages. Why do we write error messages that sound like robots when
spoken?

Maybe that is unfair to robots who speak the way developers programmed them.

Either way it doesn't seem like anything worth getting in a huff over. I don't
think it was meant as purposefully degrading or had intent to insult. If
anything it just wasn't clear enough; they meant - contains invalid characters
_for this system_. Why take it personally? I don't think whoever wrote the
error message was trying to make some sort of statement against "traditional"
names.

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davidedicillo
I feel you. My last name as a space (Di Cillo) and here in the States everyone
think that Di is my middle name so now I have a bunch of documents (even
credit cards) with my name written Davide D. Cillo... sigh.

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philwelch
I went to lunch once with a few people in Coeur d'Alene, Idaho. They always
complained that they couldn't enter their city in address fields. Likewise,
though there are many American placenames which are semantically possessive,
they usually lack apostrophes, by policy of the United States Board on
Geographic Names.

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cgomez
This isn't particularly germane or relevant, but this reminded me of that
episode of Weeds...

Nancy: The kids go to my sister, Jill. Not to Andy. Ok? Jill. Her number's in
my book. Jill Price-Grey with a fucking hyphen.

Lupita: (Writing this down) Fucking hyphen...

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sh1mmer
I regularly have the same problem.

When my American wife and I got married (in the UK) we joined names, which is
a perfectly legal name change.

My UK passport now reads Thomas Henry Hughes-Croucher. However her US password
reads Rosemarie Hughes Croucher.

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regularfry
It is for a fairly similar reason that Andrew Lloyd Webber is Lord Lloyd-
Webber.

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jwr
Imagine how people with non-ASCII characters in their names feel.

I get this all the time: I order stuff to my address and it gets mangled with
XML entities (or worse) appearing instead of characters like "ń".

~~~
coin
Translate it to ASCII, that's what the Chinese and Japanese do.

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kordless
Be sure to watch out for little Bobby Tables!

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hristov
Imagine how poor Bret Favre feels.

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tkeller
TL;DR: Here is an error message. It could be worded better, but I understand
exactly what it means and where it came from. I'm going to get all offended
about it, even though there was clearly no intent to offend.

