Quora has blocked me because it doesn't think Theodore Ts'o is my real name

https://plus.google.com/+TheodoreTso/posts/PbQaudyHmzj

by dredmorbius • 10 years ago

213 143 10 years ago

plus.google.com

yuhong• 10 years ago

I dislike real name policies, but I aim for the problems with using real names (aka being non-anonymous) to be fixed if possible.

hiou• 10 years ago

That it looks real to their customers(advertisers) is all that matters.

M_Grey2• 10 years ago

Meanwhile they love me and my fake, but entirely "normal" name. smh

timothyfcook• 10 years ago

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.

protomyth5• 10 years ago

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.

Cyph0n• 10 years ago

Haha, now I'm curious! Could you please provide some examples of Native American names?

M_Grey2• 10 years ago

Yee Naaldlooshii.

I'll show myself out.

protomyth5• 10 years ago

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.

hornetblack• 10 years ago

There's a few on this page: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Facebook_real-name_policy_cont...

Eg: Robin Kills the Enemy

dawnerd• 10 years ago

Facebook's policy is so weird. I have a ton of older test accounts that literally include TEST and other such very obvious fake text in the name.

protomyth5• 10 years ago

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.

lucaspiller2• 10 years ago

Just need to name your kids Testy McTest. Problem solved!

simcop2387• 10 years ago

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

geomark• 10 years ago

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.

ubernostrum2• 10 years ago

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.

protomyth5• 10 years ago

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.

DCoder• 10 years ago

ajmurmann• 10 years ago

Obligatory link to Patio11's gem of an article about this: https://www.kalzumeus.com/2010/06/17/falsehoods-programmers-...

Edit: phone typo

tedmiston2• 10 years ago

The only feasible way to handle a name given that, at least what I can think of, is a single unbounded textbox that's also optional.

Actually, I guess it really must be a foreign key M{0,}:N as a many-to-many to allow for having multiple names.

igravious• 10 years ago

One URL* that's a persistent URL to the identity broker of the person†.

* Ok, URI, or IRI, or whatever we're technically calling them nowadays.

† Or other named being, robot, entity …

lucaspiller2• 10 years ago

If you require users to divulge their real name (i.e. financial institutions), it's probably a better idea to have two fields:

- Your legal name

- What you'd like us to call you

ndesaulniers• 10 years ago

Ted is a long time Linux kernel hacker. [0] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Theodore_Ts%27o

slowmovintarget• 10 years ago

Which explains Linus Torvalds' comment:

  To me, you'll always just be "tytso"

fuzzfactor• 10 years ago

I certainly learned key informatioon from some of his documentation.

stormy2• 10 years ago

Unless their policy has changed, it's a temporary restriction of the account until the user helps work with a mod to verify the name.

Happened to me way back in 2010, because my real name sounds terribly fake: Stormy Shippy

danieltillett2• 10 years ago

Stormy did your parents choose your name or did you?

stormy2• 10 years ago

Easiest way to answer is with Quora itself: https://www.quora.com/What-is-the-story-behind-Stormy-Shippy...

nickpsecurity• 10 years ago

Story behind your name was pretty amazing. Ever find out the story behind his?

behnamoh• 10 years ago

In this day and age, with the heavy DS and ML that's going on in companies like GOOG, it's actually not wise to use your real name anyway.

Let them think you're just John Appleseed.

parennoob• 10 years ago

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.

titanomachy• 10 years ago

You probably won't have to worry about it unless you become famous.

5555624• 10 years ago

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.

cdubzzz• 10 years ago

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.

denzell• 10 years ago

I got blacklisted because my name is the same as a baseball pitchers name..

morecoffee• 10 years ago

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.

mancerayder• 10 years ago

I was a sysadmin a while back and a user's last name was literally O.

It was an effort to get the back end systems to tolerate that!

catalinbraescu• 10 years ago

I was banned by Quora for not agreeing to repeated edits to MY OWN question. Reason? VANDALISM. Mind boggling.

dredmorbius3• 10 years ago

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.

overgard• 10 years ago

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.

pix64• 10 years ago

The solution is to choose a "normal" pseudonym.

Senji• 10 years ago

Choose a Jewish name for added shenanigans.

bambax• 10 years ago

Exactly. I use Quora very rarely but every time I choose a plain fake name and it has always worked with zero hassle.

(I need a new one because many times I don't remember the other one or the password associated with it).

The only thing "real name policies" do is annoy people with unusual names; they can't do anything against people using fake names on purpose.

stesch• 10 years ago

Germany even had a chancellor with a pseudonym: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Willy_Brandt

tedmiston2• 10 years ago

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.

franciscop4• 10 years ago

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).

callalex• 10 years ago

This has an interesting parallel to having a spectrum of gender pronouns.

franciscop4• 10 years ago

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.

thaumasiotes2• 10 years ago

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.

raarts• 10 years ago

Where is that? Dutch so I'm interested.

franciscop4• 10 years ago

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.

speeder2• 10 years ago

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)

seiryuz2• 10 years ago

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.

gbog• 10 years ago

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).

ChoHag2• 10 years ago

in some past periods, people did not have "identification papers"

You mean last century? People are still alive from then.

cyberferret• 10 years ago

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.

analog31• 10 years ago

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.

sundarurfriend2• 10 years ago

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".

lanna3• 10 years ago

Honest question, same thing I asked above: are you able to fly? Did you ever attempt to fly to the US?

jdietrich• 10 years ago

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".

https://www.royal.uk/royal-family-name

dredmorbius3• 10 years ago

Saxe-Coburg and Gotha.

(As mentioned at your link.)

lanna3• 10 years ago

Honest question, are you able to fly? Did you ever attempt to fly to the US?

seiryuz2• 10 years ago

No worries, it's a common question for me.

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

aestetix• 10 years ago

I did a talk on this topic at Harvard a couple years ago: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=6iprHlKR6Eo

Sevrene• 10 years ago

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?

1. https://stilgherrian.com/category/only-one-name/

emsy• 10 years ago

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.

manojlds2• 10 years ago

You cannot compare Quora and Stack Exchange. Quora thrives on stupid questions that really don't have a well defined answer.

enraged_camel2• 10 years ago

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.

cpayne• 10 years ago

This depends very much on how you measure success. Remember, News Corp valued MySpace for an $580 million.

I think both (Quora and Stack Exchange) have plateaued to some level.

Neither see the insane growth they originally had.

innocentoldguy• 10 years ago

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.

thewhitetulip• 10 years ago

Yes and where only the elite get the upvotes even if they write a factually incorrect and laughable answer. Too much for being a "community"

evilzombie2• 10 years ago

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.

dmca• 10 years ago

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.

DanBC• 10 years ago

Admin staff in GP surgeries often don't understand the ID requirements, and also will copper-bottom any regs they do know about.

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.

evilzombie2• 10 years ago

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?

wingerlang2• 10 years ago

Sorting, queries, personalised content (Hey [first name]!) are some examples.

kpil• 10 years ago

Yes, but it's based on the invalid assumption that everyone follows the same pattern.

Nothing feels as faked as a "Hey [incorrect name]!" letter, so it's probably better to avoid it.

BrandoElFollito• 10 years ago

I recently got emails stating with "hello ::error::" and "dear /FirstName/"

ddebernardy• 10 years ago

There's a lot of legacy in 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.

sqldba• 10 years ago

Names

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• 10 years ago

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'.

gpvos5• 10 years ago

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.

mixedCase3• 10 years ago

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.

joelthelion• 10 years ago

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.

KyleBrandt• 10 years ago

Sounds like you are describing reddit to me :P

acdha• 10 years ago

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.

michalu• 10 years ago

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.

littleweep2• 10 years ago

Just curious, where do you go the other 99 times?

notacoward• 10 years ago

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.

the_duke• 10 years ago

The most surprising thing about this is that people actually use Google Plus.

tove• 10 years ago

Yeah, it happened to me too with a lot of names. :P

jrockway2• 10 years ago

I don't understand Real Names. If your parents give you a silly name, that's fine, but if you give yourself a silly name, that's not fine?

sireat• 10 years ago

Are only real names allowed on Quora?

Seems like a silly restriction on Quora.

I signed up to Quora with a fake name a few years ago.

After lurking for a while I have started to answer some questions in my area of expertise and get some A2A(asked to answer) sent my way.

So should I just forget about answering questions with my fake name?

aq3cn• 10 years ago

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.

Do you think this will cause a ban?

mixedCase3• 10 years ago

Do you think this will cause a ban?

Much like everything, only if they find out. To get an anonymous experience in these websites you'll have to assume a fake identity.

id122015• 10 years ago

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 ?

braythwayt• 10 years ago

Tragedy of the Commons.

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.

whywhywhywhy• 10 years ago

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.

psankar• 10 years ago

Quora has blocked me too. For Tamils there is no last name but the idiots running quora insist that everyone should have a lastname. http://psankar.blogspot.in/2015/01/naming-policy-deactivated...

speeder2• 10 years ago

King of Greece has no surname.

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)

pvaldes• 10 years ago

In Spain only members of the king family can have more than two first names, by law.

samblr• 10 years ago

It is indeed sad to hear quora policing

SNvD7vEJ• 10 years ago

Quora's "real name policy" is just moronic.

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.

Quora has blocked me because it doesn't think Theodore Ts'o is my real name

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