Name: Illegitimate

by georgecmu • 14 years ago

134 78 14 years ago

Every fraud prevention scheme is going to have false positives, so there's no excuse for not providing the user with an appeal process.

bluetidepro• 14 years ago

I completely agree. It would be one thing if you had the prevention in there but somehow had the ability to email them and get it worked out but, instead, Facebook completely ruins the UX for this person.

c250d07• 14 years ago

This blog post is quite old. They do have such an appeal system in place now.

http://i.imgur.com/xQNvz.jpg

maqr• 14 years ago

Facebook's naming policy hasn't stopped me from making up comical fake names for testing. It's pretty absurd to think that any developer is going to make test posts from their app/project/whatever to their real Facebook account (not that I have one anyway).

guelo2• 14 years ago

A few years ago Facebook banned a fake account that I created for deploying a Facebook app for the company that I worked at. With the account banned we couldn't get access to the app to support the tens of thousands of users it had. Luckily Facebook did end up reinstating the account after we appealed for a couple weeks, though they did force me to change it to my real name.

rmc4• 14 years ago

And this is why your fake account should be used only for testing. You don't want to block things for your company.

saurik• 14 years ago

They added official support for test accounts five years ago.

https://developers.facebook.com/blog/post/35/

lubutu• 14 years ago

This reminds me of Patrick McKenzie's article "Falsehoods Programmers Believe About Names".

http://www.kalzumeus.com/2010/06/17/falsehoods-programmers-b...

pwf• 14 years ago

If I'm not allowed to assume names fit into the set of Unicode symbols, what do I use for a name field in my database? An image field? What if a dragon whose name cannot be printed attempts to sign up for my service?

Someone who decides to identify themselves with Klingon (whether their parents gave them that name or not) should expect to have an alias ready...

gloob• 14 years ago

Should a Japanese octogenarian whose parents had the poor taste to spell their child's name with a character that would not make it into Unicode expect the same problem?

michaelochurch• 14 years ago

I think his reference to Unicode code points was actually based on UTF-16/8 mismatches, as in "Don't assume one character == one 16-bit char", since the upper code points (U+10000 and up) actually use two chars in, e.g., Java's UTF-16 representation.

There's a lot of code out there that works fine with one-char code points but breaks on two-char code points.

goblin892• 14 years ago

Name representation in your DB may not match original. I think it even might be fine if you only allow ASCII to input names—most people who use a computer are probably used to writing their names in latin alphabet. But you should accept that the name you store is just an alias, a person identifier. And other points are valid: you can take into account others including #7, #37, #38, #18.

I think it's more about business process than technology limitations.

bbrtyth2• 14 years ago

For the dragon, you can use a password field to hide the name, which satisfies the requirements.

Actually I think the image field is a good idea, just have everyone use a typed alias and then draw/render what they want to be called. Maybe an image and/or a sound, to be more inclusive.

JoshTriplett• 14 years ago

That article doesn't claim that your software must support all of those use cases; it exists to explain that those use cases exist, because some people genuinely believe otherwise. If you write something highly specialized with a strong need for a universal representation, such as genealogy software, you might need to deal with the strangest corner cases. Most services, however, can get away with two simple rules: don't ask for a name if you don't need it, and if you do, use a single Unicode text field and don't try to parse it.

sriramk• 14 years ago

FB's email policy is equally braindead. My email address used to be mail@sriramkrishnan.com - they disallow names like 'mail', 'admin', etc. So I had to come up with a new alias just for FB.

But I keep getting hit by this in odd ways. Like with the FB+Heroku integration - I couldn't get FB to accept that my Heroku login was valid because it was failing the 'Is this a suspicious alias' test.

If someone from FB is watching, you would save me a great deal of annoyance if you help me get around this.

craigmccaskill• 14 years ago

I'll +1 this, I have the same exact issue.

This is the single most annoying thing about signing up for services. If they disallow this or the +flag chances are I won't sign up for a service.

ojbyrne2• 14 years ago

This is from 2006. Is it even still accurate?

Posibyte• 14 years ago

It serves more as a warning than a finger point. Problems like this will continue to pop up as long as misconceptions exist between what developers think people do and what people actually do.

ojbyrne2• 14 years ago

I guess the first part is fair. But I think there will always be misconceptions between what programmers initially think, and reality. I'd actually prefer "simplifications" rather than misconceptions.

Every product I've seen starts out pure, beautiful, etc... Then the edge cases start getting reported, and pure beautiful code very rapidly gets dragged down to earth.

You unsimplify code as needed, as exceptions crop up.

Mz3• 14 years ago

A friend told me that her programmer husband once used the cat's name to test a system he was working on. They soon had credit card offers for the cat. Yet, like this lady and others here, I recently ran up against frustration I can't seem to fix when a brand new account was deleted.

I used to naively think my name issues were limited to people being unable to spell or pronounce my names. But, no, it gets betterer.

evincarofautumn2• 14 years ago

Your story reminds me of Sal Esposito of Boston, who was summoned for jury duty despite the problematic fact of being a housecat.

Mz3• 14 years ago

My ex husband was a "jr." I still get credit card offers for my first name last name jr. I also once had a really nutty phone discussion with a marketer where I tried to flippantly make the point that I can't be a junior since I got married and thus no longer have the same last name as my mother. They didn't seem to get it.

I thought I would escape my name issues by marrying. No dice. I thought I would escape them by going by my more common middle name. It doesn't help as much as I hoped. It's like a curse.

But at least I don't own a cat.

TazeTSchnitzel• 14 years ago

Null is a name, Fake is a name, almost anything could be. Don't make assumptions.

Bobby_Tables• 14 years ago

Ok, now I don't feel so bad about having worked on a system that was confounded by people having the letter ñ in their name. (Surprisingly, it had no problem with someone else whose middle initial is the number 8.)

mmastrac• 14 years ago

Jennifer 8 Lee?

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Jennifer_8._Lee

orbitingpluto• 14 years ago

Well that's one way for your child to avoid jail time or fillibuster on the floor.

Please state your name for the record:

"Bob Pi BlahBlah"

reso• 14 years ago

This is from 2006. I'm sure their fake name detection is much more sophisticated by now.

SideburnsOfDoom2• 14 years ago

What evidence makes you sure?

thenonsequitur• 14 years ago

The detection may not be more sophisticated, but the UX is a bit better now. Now it says "Our automated system will not approve this name. If you believe this is an error, please contact us." The "contact us" links to https://www.facebook.com/help/?faq=212848065405122. In that FAQ, it explains that you need to use your real name, and leads to another link where you can appeal the automated decision: http://www.facebook.com/help/contact/?id=237843336274237. You have to upload a government-issued ID to get the account.

chris_wot2• 14 years ago

As sophisticated as their gender dropdown, which only includes "Male" and "Female". I just tried to register Chris Fake, and it tells me:

"Our automated system will not approve this name. If you believe this is an error, please contact us."

At least they let folks contact them now, I guess.

uptown4• 14 years ago

Is there some other gender I'm unaware of?

joshmlewis• 14 years ago

I love how this came out of the Null threads comments. EDIT: link http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=3900727

jonah• 14 years ago

ESPN has this pretty interesting commercial about having the same name as a celebrity: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=WxBBN3ZnYeU

apike• 14 years ago

A popular thing to do when you have the same name as a celebrity is go by a different version of your name. "Mike Jordan", "William Smith", and "Thomas Jones" sound like plain, common names instead of the names of celebrities.

barik• 14 years ago

Samir: Hmm... well, why don't you just go by Mike instead of Michael?

Michael Bolton: No way! Why should I change? He's the one who sucks.

randallsquared• 14 years ago

My first and last names are the same (probably you can guess what they are without even googling...), and Facebook around 2006 also rejected me. I don't remember if I emailed them to resolve it or just waited and tried again later.

lubujackson• 14 years ago

My favorite version of this problem was an old cornerback for the Patriots named Randall Gay. His friends/family couldn't go to the NFL store to get custom jersey's made because his last name is "profane".

mikeryan• 14 years ago

I had to look this up its kind of funny the complete list of banned names is here

http://outsports.com/nfl/2005/0301nflshopnaughtywords.htm

There's actually a few in there that could turn up as names. But a lot of humor in that list. "Flogging the Dolphin" is not allowed on the back of NFL Jersey's if anyone was thinking of that. (and if Pud is viewing this thread, don't try getting your nickname on the back of a jersey)

rmc4• 14 years ago

Sounds like they are discriminating against people based on sexual orientation. (e.g. a homosexual man who is a big fan of sports might want to wear that at a gay pride parade). I presume this is USA, in which case ye need to make some proper equality law, if it's EU, then sue em.

zerostar07• 14 years ago

Anybody surprised that she doesn't use yahoo mail?

Wilya• 14 years ago

Since nobody seems to have actually tried it: you will still get blocked. Though the message has become:

"Our automated system will not approve this name. If you believe this is an error, please contact us.[0]"

[0] http://www.facebook.com/help/?faq=212848065405122

chris_wot2• 14 years ago

Man - if they were going to exclude a surname, they could at least research it first, surely? After 5 minutes Google search, I found the following:

http://www.surnamedb.com/Surname/Fake

HaloZero• 14 years ago

I own Ivan Ooze and Rita Repulsa facebook accounts. Apparently ooze is fine for a last name

ctdonath• 14 years ago

Once I entered my town name of "Cumming" on a web page, and it objected with "my, what colorful language."

paulschreiber• 14 years ago

Years ago, the University of Waterloo licensed technology from Ask Jeeves for "Ask the Warrior." (The Warrior is the name of the school's athletic teams.) This site was targeted at prospective students, who could ask basic questions such as "how many students are in the Math faculty?"

However, if you Asked the Warrior what "concordia com veritate" (the university's motto) meant, it told you not to use dirty words.

derleth4• 14 years ago

> "concordia com veritate"

cum, not com.

I wouldn't bother except the story doesn't work if you change that vowel.

('Cum' is Latin for 'with'; "concordia cum veritate" means "In harmony with truth", which the search program was not.)

AncientPC• 14 years ago

While we're on the topic of poor programmer assumptions, here's a problem a developer ran into with his family tree software when it turned out there was a cycle in a user's tree (father had children with his daughters):

http://stackoverflow.com/questions/6163683/cycles-in-family-...

dionidium• 14 years ago

It's quite often the case that things that seem braindead just don't matter. That is, if this practice blocks a lot of illegitimate accounts, then the only person who cares that it happens to block yours too is you. I'm not defending the practice, I'm just saying there's no money in accommodating edge cases.

Nearly every complaint about crappy customer service ignores that large companies don't have much incentive to improve at the margins.

guard-of-terra2• 14 years ago

Does this sound anti-free market and pro-regulation?

Because I can totally imagine how a lawsuit can suddenly incentivise them.

mhartl• 14 years ago

Since no one else seems to have noted it: the OP is not just a Fake, she's a famous Fake: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Caterina_Fake You'd think the cofounder of Flickr would be treated with more respect by a computer...

Name: Illegitimate

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