That sucks:

http://weblog.raganwald.com/2007/09/you-suck.html

I'm a Norwegian with a Norwegian letter in my name ("ø"). It is simply impossible to enter my name correctly.

Let's say that my last name is "Strømmen" (it's not). Then I can expect my name to be displayed as:

Strmmen, Strømmen, Strømmen, Str?n, Str mmen. Strxmmen (where did they get the "x" from?)

Please include non ASCII characters in your unit tests, and use UTF-8 on everything.

And another reminder is that not all countries have the same address syntax as you. (+ phone numbers)

In an increasingly international world, making any assumptions about names is just asking for trouble. In some cases even the first name / last name structure doesn't hold up. It's probably best to just assume that the name can be represented by a free-text field.

I was reading the comments and saw someone mention fuzzy bunny (fuzzi bunni?) then realized the comments were from 2006.

As for a better solution. Allow anything but flag the names you would normally ban to a moderator to have them checked over.

That would work with profanity in most cases, but would it work with Fake? How would the moderator confirm that this really is a person named Fake, and not someone who doesn't want to give their real name?

A faxed copy of your ID and an onsite blood test obviously. :)

Seriously though, if someone wants to give a fake name they will, be it Caterina Fake or Caterina Doe so I don't think(short of the joking solution above) you will ever get around that in a way that is generally acceptable. In most cases though you are just looking to filter out the explit and "Fake Name" and "Not MyName" people.

When I ran a club website for my university we were asked to implement a policy of having full names recorded for all our members. This was a change from our previous practice of only storing handles for everyone. I had to go through and ask everyone to add their name to their profile. One individual did not update, so I contacted them individually. As it turned out, what I had assumed was a silly-sounding "fantasy role-playing" name was in fact her given name! So I ended up feeling silly myself, and learned a lesson about making assumptions.

In this case the university directory corroborated the identity of the member, but in the absence of a definitive reference like that, I now just give people the benefit of the doubt.

I have the same problem "John Graham-Cumming" often gets flagged as offensive.

How did you make it through high school? :-)

Wildly off-topic and hardly serious, but consider the problems the actress Leslie Hope must get. Imagine her stopped when driving on holiday in Britain. "How do you give your name?" asks the Bobby, and mindful of the English preference for surname first, she replies:

"Hope, Leslie"

I don't get it...

"How do you give your name?"

"Hopelessly."

Awesome :-D

<3 your posts btw

As I said a long time ago in a Slashdot comment answering almost the same question... don't mess with someone whose last name is Cumming and who made it through school :-)

Classic.