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).
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".
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'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 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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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'.
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?
[+] [-] seiryuz|9 years ago|reply
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|9 years ago|reply
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).
[+] [-] sundarurfriend|9 years ago|reply
[+] [-] jdietrich|9 years ago|reply
https://www.royal.uk/royal-family-name
[+] [-] lanna|9 years ago|reply
[+] [-] overgard|9 years ago|reply
Just let people run with the identities they choose. There's nothing special about a name.
[+] [-] stesch|9 years ago|reply
[+] [-] pix64|9 years ago|reply
[+] [-] stormy|9 years ago|reply
Happened to me way back in 2010, because my real name sounds terribly fake: Stormy Shippy
[+] [-] parennoob|9 years ago|reply
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.
[+] [-] danieltillett|9 years ago|reply
[+] [-] nickpsecurity|9 years ago|reply
[+] [-] unknown|9 years ago|reply
[deleted]
[+] [-] behnamoh|9 years ago|reply
Let them think you're just John Appleseed.
[+] [-] franciscop|9 years ago|reply
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|9 years ago|reply
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.
[+] [-] franciscop|9 years ago|reply
[+] [-] callalex|9 years ago|reply
[+] [-] joelthelion|9 years ago|reply
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|9 years ago|reply
[+] [-] acdha|9 years ago|reply
[+] [-] notacoward|9 years ago|reply
[+] [-] KyleBrandt|9 years ago|reply
[+] [-] protomyth|9 years ago|reply
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.
[+] [-] evilzombie|9 years ago|reply
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|9 years ago|reply
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.
[+] [-] DanBC|9 years ago|reply
This can lead to some onerous requirements when people want to change name.
Your GP surgery should have a system for gathering patient feedback (it's something the CQC looks for) so you can try using that.
If you don't get anywhere with their process you could try your local clinical commissioning group.
If you wanted to go the technical route you could ask what software they use, and find a user group for that software to ask how it would be done.
Of course, you shouldn't need to do any of that. It sucks that they're making you jump through hoops.
[+] [-] ajmurmann|9 years ago|reply
Edit: phone typo
[+] [-] emsy|9 years ago|reply
[+] [-] evilzombie|9 years ago|reply
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?
[+] [-] ddebernardy|9 years ago|reply
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.
[+] [-] sqldba|9 years ago|reply
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).
[+] [-] Theodores|9 years ago|reply
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'.
[+] [-] wingerlang|9 years ago|reply
[+] [-] ndesaulniers|9 years ago|reply
[+] [-] id122015|9 years ago|reply
Why dont more of us contribute to software immune to censorship ?
[+] [-] braythwayt|9 years ago|reply
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|9 years ago|reply
[+] [-] timothyfcook|9 years ago|reply
[+] [-] whywhywhywhy|9 years ago|reply
[+] [-] yuhong|9 years ago|reply
[+] [-] unknown|9 years ago|reply
[deleted]
[+] [-] hiou|9 years ago|reply
[+] [-] SNvD7vEJ|9 years ago|reply
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|9 years ago|reply
It was an effort to get the back end systems to tolerate that!
[+] [-] catalinbraescu|9 years ago|reply
[+] [-] dredmorbius|9 years ago|reply
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|9 years ago|reply
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/