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.
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).
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.
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
While I was in grad school, it was possible for married students to purchase two sets of football tickets. Concerned about scalping, the university one year decided to require a marriage license at the ticket window. It was chaos.
I was in a similar situation as you (south Indian with only one name), and after trying to reason with their customer support, I found it easier to just use a fake name.
If you think my real name is fake for no good reason, go ahead and have a fake name that "sounds real".
(Not sure if you'll see this reply this late, but...)
The situation regarding ID's is a mess, but I believe I'll be able to fly, to the US or wherever, without issues (though I haven't done so yet).
The reason is that, India being a multicultural country, our central government that issues passports assumes a firstname-lastname pattern as well. And back when I got the passport, I didn't yet understand the firstname-lastname concept, and just followed the passport office employee's instruction: "don't leave that 'surname' field empty, that's for your father's name". I was curious why the heck someone would label that field as surname, but just took it as part of bureaucracy. And so, I have a passport to the name "myname fathersname".
The "mess" I referred to in the first line is about how different ID's have my name in different forms: let's say my name was David and my dad's is Michael. I have government issued id's that say my name is:
The British royal family have run into the same problem. Traditionally, they use a first name and a title, e.g. "Prince William, Duke of Cambridge". For legal purposes, they occasionally use the surname "Windsor" or "Mountbatten-Windsor". This is applied rather inconsistently - Prince William enlisted in the Air Force as "William Wales".
I can fly internationally just fine, however my name always gave the immigration officer a headache. Simply because, there's no standard way of resolving it and searching for the correct record of me is painful.
For example
the name on my passport: Steven
My UK Visa: Steven Steven
If I need got to US, from what I heard: Either "Steven LNU"(Last Name Unknown) or "FNU Steven" (First Name Unknown)
Some institutions prefer:
Steven -
Steven .
Steven ,
So yeah, major headaches, especially because my only name is super generic
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.
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.
Yeah I usually opt for some minority subculture to get past this stuff - ie facebook wouldnt interfere with the adjective middle name meme if you were black - or if that doesn't work I then guilt trip tech companies into being aware of minority group naming patterns, or if that doesnt work I tell them Ill call (or actually contact) washington post to give them the monthly reminder about how little perspective they get from other ethnic groups
Its pretty successful
But you can also just order fake ids on darknet for web site verifications
I doubt you need an actual fake ID to get past social networking ID verification. A cell phone picture of your driver's license where you hamfistedly change the name and some digits in the number in Photoshop should be good enough for 99.9% of cases.
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.
If the you find the policy so absurd, why not just stop using the service now? This sort of behavior, opposing policies but only acting on it when it affects you directly, is precisely what gives this "random social network" so much power.
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.
The problem with a layman like myself trying to read the law is this kind of thing "except as authorized under regulations made pursuant to law" [1]. What does that mean? It makes the law entirely unreadable. Does this actually prohibit me from making a scan of my passport as a backup while travelling? Presumably not, given that doing so is actually the official suggestion of the state department [2]. So how the hell do I know if something is illegal or not?
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).
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.
I will even add that what you know as nicknames in other countries are deemed as real names here. My first full name is "Francisco de Paula", but in Spain everyone calls me "Paco" (historical reasons and all) the same as with a handful of other names. But the thing is it doesn't have a nickname status but rather these kind of names are used everyday in professional and personal spaces. I also gave up that fight and for everyone internationally I'm Francisco ( heck I even got http://francisco.io/ ). But that is not even so different as many Chineses/Korean/Vietnamese people choose international names as well that differ from their real name.
I am of Portuguese descent (and learned recently I can't become citizen because my Portuguese grandpa died when my father was a child :/)
I have two first names, two last names, and filho (means "son"). I have yet to find any system that understand my name properly, even in Brazil where I had official documents with my name butchered in one way or another. (Nevermindt people assuming the last name was literal last name and insisting in calling me Mr. Filho, something that doesn't make sense)
Well the first family name comes from the father and the second one from the mother (who doesn't get hers deleted when marrying). I've heard that some Argentinians can choose freely whether the first family name is the mother's or the father's.
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.
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.
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.
I added quora.com to my search result spam blacklist for content cloaking back before Google made them tone it down so you'd at least see the text you saw in the search results. It'd take a top-level management change to consider going back.
I was a Top Writer on Quora for two years in a row. I ended up quitting it entirely for a whole laundry list of reasons. Chief among them was the uneven enforcement of rules and manipulation of answer rankings so that people who promote themselves and/or generally post catchy-but-crappy answers always end up at the top for every question and every topic. Quora is more like those "one weird trick" listicle sites than a place to find actual information or insight, and it's quite intentional on their part.
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.
I have a friend who, courtesy of some... let's say unique parents, was graced with multiple middle names and then multiple hyphenated (and unhyphenated) family names as her parents divorced, remarried and she moved between households. Then she got married herself and tacked her husband's last name onto the end of it.
Her legal name at this point clocks in at enough words and characters to not fit in most government databases. I've been tempted once or twice to create a similar but fake name to use as a test case for things that handle identity information.
Got a friend from Bangladesh that has the same problem. He went with first, last, and a string of middle initials. Still has problems. I often think we need a whole class in college on these type of issues. Probably right after the ethics class.
32. People’s names are assigned at birth.
33. OK, maybe not at birth, but at least pretty close to birth.
34. Alright, alright, within a year or so of birth.
35. Five years?
36. You’re kidding me, right?
I must know what case there is of this, and who exactly was the poor soul to stumble upon it...
It's not automatic a lot of places, these days. It's just a far simpler/faster process to get the name change done, and most companies and even government agencies won't raise a fuss over a woman filling out a last name that doesn't match her ID, because they'll assume she got married and took her husband's name.
My family came from South America to the US where people use their father's and mother's last names as part of their full name. Sure enough, that's what's on my green card, social security card, and driver's license. But since in real life we only use one last name, all of my non-government but still important stuff (college, work, etc.) only has one last name. And in real life only my family knows I even have another last name.
I've had countless problems with this and delays in getting stuff transmitted or done because people won't believe it's me or won't understand why I have a second last name (which I or my family never asked for when moving here). If just one extra word causes problems, I can't imagine what other cultures have to deal with! No wonder European immigrants a hundred years ago Americanized their names when moving here :-)
I tried to get two last names through marriage but California wasn't having any of it ...so my partner and I decided to shift names over and functionally have the same result. I probably saved myself your trouble - and I had a Spanish roommate in the past that had mail addressed to him with his two last names in 10+ different combinations - but that so many people have yet to tackle their misconceptions about names is frustrating :(
I do have two wonderful? related problems now though: I come across the occasional racist jerk that I can learn to avoid because they can't help Questioning my last name not matching my ethnicity, and I come across people that don't realize that my name in my other language hasn't changed (and that that's just not a Thing that happens in that culture). Yay names.
Oh sure, you getaway with test and I have kids coming to me in tears because Facebook killed their account. I'm the local sysadmin, but I can't help with SV companies without an actual contact number.
I got upset when they went through and deleted all locations that weren't mappable. I used to have my location as one in the moon for fun, then they deleted that and wouldn't let me set one unless the address was available in their geolocation service
Yeah. I've done some work for other people and businesses in their Facebook accounts but never signed up myself. Recently I tried to sign up just so I could add Facebook Login to one of my apps. Used my real name, verified my email and mobile number, and account was immediately blocked, requiring me to send in a scan of my id. Nope.
Yellow Bird tends to get banned by Facebook. Good Iron is another favorite ban. Never mind those that actually use their name in their native language. Plus, there is the whole concept of birth name and name after a naming ceremony. Plenty of opportunities for a ethnocentric policy to add some pain into the world.
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.
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.
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.
“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."
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.
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.
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?
You usually want the last name separate when you want to be able to sort users alphabetically by their last name instead of their first name or nickname. But this admittedly makes less and less sense in the age of search and monster datasets.
Also: for personalized content. "Hi John" is better than "Hi John Smith" when sending email. There's a gazillion ways to fail extracting the first name when a name doesn't follow a [first] [last] name format.
1. They're separated because other data sinks you share with want them separated, like the tax office.
2. They're separated because people want to call you by your first or last name depending on the situation, and they don't want to force you to fill in every variation. What's your name; what's the name you want us to call you; what's your name we should put on any mail to you; what's your "more formal name" like we'd use if we sued you?
Addresses
2. That is often a requirement of postal offices. They're pretty amazing in that they work at all but a lot of that is because street, suburb, state, country, are often on different lines. (But of course some countries have completely and utterly different differentiations for this, too).
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'.
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.
As it was mentioned somewhere else, asking for a full legal name and a shorthand form ("what you'd want us to call you") is a good solution that covers both usecases.
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 ?
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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?
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.
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)
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.
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.
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.
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.