11 ms·

I am amazed that a lot of systems don't allow changing of information once entered. I signed up with a new ISP a couple of years ago - one of the biggest ISPs

I am amazed that a lot of systems don't allow changing of information once entered. I signed up with a new ISP a couple of years ago - one of the biggest ISPs in Australia, and during the phone conversation to set up my plan, the operator heard my first name wrong, substituting a 'v' with a 'b'. I didn't realise during the call (because, well, it IS hard to pick up that nuance audibly) until they sent me my sign on links which of course had the typo in my username. Billing information is also all wrong. When I told them about it, their response was pretty much "Oh, too bad - once that username is created, it is there for life. You will have to shut down that account and create a new one", meaning I lose all the benefits I got from the promotional transfer. So I just put up with a wrong first name whenever I sign on or ask for support from them. I still think it is strange that some second or third level support engineer can't just change that info in the database for me, after the proper authentication. I can't believe that something so easy to create over the phone can be so hard to change over the phone.

Mtinie 10y ago
Immutability of names may be a perceived benefit and a feature, vs. simply poor UX. Regulatory, perhaps?
- yeukhon 10y ago
  Regulatory is a process, so if there's a process... we can correct name on a typo on our passport, why not in this case? Either the regulatory is really really stupid (we never thought of it!), or the company bought a bad system.
  - okket 10y ago
    Amazing that in the age of git and Merkle trees it is still hard to change something plus keeping an immutable history of the changes for documentation/accountability purposes. This should be a basic requirement for any sane system nowadays.
    - sly010 10y ago
      It is how most databases, filesystems and distributed systems work, so we know how to build those things, we don't even need merkle trees. And despite the fact that many real world problems can be better modeled with an append only log and a derived state, somehow 99% of software systems opt to store the derived state only.
- emodendroket 10y ago
  Hard to imagine any situation whatever where someone's name would change so that definitely makes a lot of sense.
  - okket 10y ago
    Marriage.
    - emodendroket 10y ago
      Yeah, that's what I was getting at.
      - thomasfoster96 10y ago
        Friendly suggestion: The italics didn’t help the sarcasm come across any easier.
        emodendroket 10y ago
        So what do you suggest?
        throwanem 10y ago
        A trailing /s is the convention. Failing that, perhaps less subtlety? Text is poor at conveying tone.
        emodendroket 10y ago
        Why don't I put a flashing red sign that says I am joking while I'm at it?
        TeMPOraL 10y ago
        It's up to you; you're the one controlling the chances people will get the joke in your comment :P.
komali2 10y ago
>lose all the benefits from promotional transfer Were you not able to direct the person on the phone to recreate the account for you, and to include all benefits, and then some for the inconvenience? I've always gotten what I wanted from US ISPs. Say what you want about their evil business practices, but it sure is easy to get whatever weird shit you're asking for with simple "ok, you can't give me this? Please escalate to your manager / please transfer me to retention."
- philovivero 10y ago
  I am curious your life experience that makes you assume fixing the errors is doable with a phone operator. I'm from California, and my assumption is no, the person on the phone wouldn't be able to recreate the account with benefits/promotion. In my experience with phone staff in any large org, once an error is committed, it's generally a one-way street. Attempts to get the person to fix things lead to worse and worse problems, more damage, more problems. My experience with T-Mobile seems typical: simply wanted to take monthly plans of myself and wife (both with TMbl) and combine into a single family plan. By the time the ordeal was done, I'd forfeit the remainder of my month's payment into the plan, had no functional phone, was being bounced between two different departments neither of whom could fix it, and both of whom insisted the other was the one to fix it. In the end I just let the money go and moved my phone number onto a competitor. I have no faith the competitor will fare better if some error is made.
  - got2surf 10y ago
    Anecdotally, I've had bad experiences with T-Mobile (similar issues with customer service reps messing up a plan transfer, and being unable to fix it), but I've found Verizon reps to be more able/willing to fix things.
  - btschaegg 10y ago
    Funny story: My ISP actually closed my contract earlier this year. Out of the blue, I got a phone call from someone about "my cancellation". After some puzzled minutes the operator figured out that someone else with the same name cancelled their account but didn't state a customer ID or his address, so they went on to cancel mine. The operator told me he'd correct this, but a month later my internet access went down all the same. After some back and forth to get it back up, the next supporter I had on the line said that they actually tried to cancel the cancellation, "but it was already too late for that" and the system didn't let them. That was surely one of the bigger WTF moments I had with support so far.
joering2 10y ago
Might be as simple as some genius designed database using usernames instead of ids for relations in tables. Trust me - I seen things like this before (with huge companies where dev soft costed millions of USD). Probably same story here.
- mjevans 10y ago
  Or worse, someone designed the database correctly, but then added a (hidden to the user) unique identifier that's normalized in some way to make it short, unique, and limited on allowed characters. Often /that/ doesn't get updated when they update the username, leading to mass confusing since external tooling will use that as the subject identifier instead of actually being given a proper internal identifier. (Offhand I can't recall if any particular standard happens to require that such an identifier start with a letter; at least one probably does.)
- chris_wot 10y ago
  And this is why you should always use synthetic keys.
chrisper 10y ago
That reminds me of American Express. My firstname is Christopher, but it seems parts of their system have a very short length limit. So when they send letters and emails, they call me "Christophe". It is spelled correctly on my card, though
- abrowne 10y ago
  A high school classmate's name was Joseph Longname, which the attendance system displayed as "LONGNAME, Jose".
- cardamomo 10y ago
  I'm also a Christopher. For the longest time, in the upper right corner of Amazon.com, there was a sign-out link that said, "Not Christ...?"
  - kagamine 10y ago
    I've seen that too, "Welcome Christ..."
  - SmellyGeekBoy 10y ago
    Heh, mine has always just been my first initial. "Welcome, R!". Also when I buy Kindle ebooks the default option is "Send to R's Kindle". I have no idea where this info is stored as the details on my billing / shipping addresses have my correct (full) name.
- kagamine 10y ago
  Windows had this length limit all the up to and including Win8, my work login which included a 3 letter domain and backslash was too long for Windows, so they cut the last 3 letters of my name off so that I could be logged in. It's made logging in to to some work services difficult, I'm not always sure they are asking for full ID like email address, or the truncated version.
  - in_the_sticks 10y ago
    10 isn't much better if you're using a Microsoft account. My email follows the format "fmlastname@gmail.com" (and is coincidentally the exact same character count). My user directory gets shortened to "fmlas".
tim333 10y ago
Same thing for Hacker News - you can't change your username and keep your karma. I guess the designers just don't design for that. https://www.quora.com/Why-cant-I-change-my-username-on-Hacker-News https://www.quora.com/Why-cant-I-change-my-username-on-Hacke...
- mayoff 10y ago
  I wouldn't want an HN user to be able to ditch her reputation while keeping her karma.
  - axlprose 10y ago
    Perhaps not in that case, but regardless, this is the kind of thing should be designed in deliberately as a feature (with an option to bypass it under special circumstances), rather than some accidental/arbitrary technical limitation just because the dev team didn't bother to implement the ability to update the field for whatever reason.
  - CM30 10y ago
    Given your profile shows all your comments and submissions (and would likely still show them if only the name was changed), I'm not sure what the big deal is here.
    - mayoff 10y ago
      You learn to recognize the names of active users that post in threads you're interested in. I shouldn't be able to ditch that recognition but keep my karma, and you shouldn't have to look through my history to see if I'm someone you previously recognized.
      - CM30 10y ago
        Eh, maybe I don't see it. I mean, I use a lot of internet forums running scripts like XenForo and IPB, and those let you change your 'display name' whenever the hell you like. Yet I still recognise everyone perfectly fine. There are people on my forums that change their display name, avatar and signature on a weekly basis. I still recognise them just fine. Same works on Discord too. There you can change your name whenever the hell you feel like it. Again, doesn't stop most people recognising you.
traviscj 10y ago
If this is the type of error you want to minimize, NATO phonetic alphabet [1] is worth learning. (Amateur radio is a good place to practice, though I'll admit I'm a bit rusty.) I actually kinda enjoy these minor discrepancies, because it exposes who has sold my customer data and to whom -- though I've never gone as far as giving anyone intentionally incorrect data with this purpose in mind. I remember my parents also being amused with these copied mistakes, and with greater frequency. Seems plausible that the error rate goes down when most of my utilities/accounts were self-created online instead of typed in from a handwritten form or during an onboarding phonecall. [1]: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/NATO_phonetic_alphabet https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/NATO_phonetic_alphabet
- cyberferret 10y ago
  Ironically (being a former pilot), I DID use radio phonetics when spelling out my name - I just wish ALL call centre staff used the same baseline too.. :) Me: That's ABCD as in Alpha, Bravo, Charlie, Delta. Them: So, that's Alpha, Burger, er, Charles, Diamond??
  - ajford 10y ago
    That's one of my pet peeves... There's an official phonetic letter system, why don't they train these people in call centers to use them? My last job used radios for site communication, and everyone had to use the NATO phonetics, and was provided with a cheat sheet for learning. You'd think that would be something they could tape up in every cube in a call center...
    - unscaled 10y ago
      Or better yet, upgrade our phone system to bleeding-edge high-fidelity CD quality with 44.1khz and 16 bits. It's not a natural law that phone audio quality has to suck.
- viraptor 10y ago
  Even with a phonetic alphabet, you can still run into issues. Some people are just surprised when they hear it. "P for Papa" / "was that P as in Patrick?" Sigh... I'm seriously considering changing my surname to something that's trivial to understand in English.
brokenmachine 10y ago
I had a similar experience with an Australian ISP, although not with a typo. When I moved house I had to make up a new username/email. They couldn't just change my address, they had to create a whole new account. I'm looking at you, TPG. Truth be told, they have been a fine ISP, other than that WTF.
- kagamine 10y ago
  Similarly, my job lets me claim a part of the monthly internet bill as a work-from-home expense, but my ISP cost me 6 months expenses because they couldn't transfer the account to my name from my SO's. Same last name, same address. To start a new account they wanted a sign up fee equal to about 3 months of said expenses. Employer would not accept a copy of the bill in my SO's name (same surname, same address) citing tax fraud, which surely would have been our own breach of law if we both had been making the same claim on the same bill. Bureaucracy won again. Until we got a different operator at the ISP who worked out that they could add my name as if the account was landlord & renter scenario, so there could be an owner and another who was responsible for payment.
Karlozkiller 10y ago
My friend was trying to get an account with his ISP to his apartment. The ISP got data from the landlord, my friend noticed that he was in fact getting internet for another apartment completely. He first told them to cancel the deal, then tried again, same wrong apartment number registered, he called the ISP and the response was, "yes we know it's the wrong one, but we've mapped that apartment to your apartment on our side, so all is good." How would it play out legally if I sign a contract where delivery is to be made to X but I want it to Y, but they tell me to sign it anyways because they can fix it in their end. I mean, what I signed would not be what I wanted, how so I prove this if my wish is not fulfilled?
trueSlav 10y ago
> I am amazed that a lot of systems don't allow changing of information once entered. Common in many underengineered systems as it shifts the responsibility from engineers to the users. When you have a set of records that were created based on and depend on (a combination of) values from some other records, you have two options: a) disable editing of the originals (tell the user to "just create new items" or b) introduce versioning. a) is fine until it isn't and creating a "new items" is a complex task or depends on other tasks. b) is not easy to implement into existing systems.. so..
luca_ing 10y ago
> Oh, too bad - once that username is created, it is there for life. So what happens if you change your name, e.g. because of marriage? Twitch.
eganist 10y ago
> I am amazed that a lot of systems don't allow changing of information once entered. For systems where cell-level change logging on the order of years is a requirement, this doesn't surprise me. Many providers would rather prohibit edits rather than risk having to greatly expand logging requirements.

Mtinie 10y ago

Immutability of names may be a perceived benefit and a feature, vs. simply poor UX. Regulatory, perhaps?

yeukhon 10y ago
Regulatory is a process, so if there's a process... we can correct name on a typo on our passport, why not in this case? Either the regulatory is really really stupid (we never thought of it!), or the company bought a bad system.
- okket 10y ago
  Amazing that in the age of git and Merkle trees it is still hard to change something plus keeping an immutable history of the changes for documentation/accountability purposes. This should be a basic requirement for any sane system nowadays.
  - sly010 10y ago
    It is how most databases, filesystems and distributed systems work, so we know how to build those things, we don't even need merkle trees. And despite the fact that many real world problems can be better modeled with an append only log and a derived state, somehow 99% of software systems opt to store the derived state only.
emodendroket 10y ago
Hard to imagine any situation whatever where someone's name would change so that definitely makes a lot of sense.
- okket 10y ago
  Marriage.
  - emodendroket 10y ago
    Yeah, that's what I was getting at.
    - thomasfoster96 10y ago
      Friendly suggestion: The italics didn’t help the sarcasm come across any easier.
      - emodendroket 10y ago
        So what do you suggest?
        throwanem 10y ago
        A trailing /s is the convention. Failing that, perhaps less subtlety? Text is poor at conveying tone.
        emodendroket 10y ago
        Why don't I put a flashing red sign that says I am joking while I'm at it?
        TeMPOraL 10y ago
        It's up to you; you're the one controlling the chances people will get the joke in your comment :P.

komali2 10y ago

>lose all the benefits from promotional transfer Were you not able to direct the person on the phone to recreate the account for you, and to include all benefits, and then some for the inconvenience? I've always gotten what I wanted from US ISPs. Say what you want about their evil business practices, but it sure is easy to get whatever weird shit you're asking for with simple "ok, you can't give me this? Please escalate to your manager / please transfer me to retention."

philovivero 10y ago
I am curious your life experience that makes you assume fixing the errors is doable with a phone operator. I'm from California, and my assumption is no, the person on the phone wouldn't be able to recreate the account with benefits/promotion. In my experience with phone staff in any large org, once an error is committed, it's generally a one-way street. Attempts to get the person to fix things lead to worse and worse problems, more damage, more problems. My experience with T-Mobile seems typical: simply wanted to take monthly plans of myself and wife (both with TMbl) and combine into a single family plan. By the time the ordeal was done, I'd forfeit the remainder of my month's payment into the plan, had no functional phone, was being bounced between two different departments neither of whom could fix it, and both of whom insisted the other was the one to fix it. In the end I just let the money go and moved my phone number onto a competitor. I have no faith the competitor will fare better if some error is made.
- got2surf 10y ago
  Anecdotally, I've had bad experiences with T-Mobile (similar issues with customer service reps messing up a plan transfer, and being unable to fix it), but I've found Verizon reps to be more able/willing to fix things.
- btschaegg 10y ago
  Funny story: My ISP actually closed my contract earlier this year. Out of the blue, I got a phone call from someone about "my cancellation". After some puzzled minutes the operator figured out that someone else with the same name cancelled their account but didn't state a customer ID or his address, so they went on to cancel mine. The operator told me he'd correct this, but a month later my internet access went down all the same. After some back and forth to get it back up, the next supporter I had on the line said that they actually tried to cancel the cancellation, "but it was already too late for that" and the system didn't let them. That was surely one of the bigger WTF moments I had with support so far.

joering2 10y ago

Might be as simple as some genius designed database using usernames instead of ids for relations in tables. Trust me - I seen things like this before (with huge companies where dev soft costed millions of USD). Probably same story here.

mjevans 10y ago
Or worse, someone designed the database correctly, but then added a (hidden to the user) unique identifier that's normalized in some way to make it short, unique, and limited on allowed characters. Often /that/ doesn't get updated when they update the username, leading to mass confusing since external tooling will use that as the subject identifier instead of actually being given a proper internal identifier. (Offhand I can't recall if any particular standard happens to require that such an identifier start with a letter; at least one probably does.)
chris_wot 10y ago
And this is why you should always use synthetic keys.

chrisper 10y ago

That reminds me of American Express. My firstname is Christopher, but it seems parts of their system have a very short length limit. So when they send letters and emails, they call me "Christophe". It is spelled correctly on my card, though

abrowne 10y ago
A high school classmate's name was Joseph Longname, which the attendance system displayed as "LONGNAME, Jose".
cardamomo 10y ago
I'm also a Christopher. For the longest time, in the upper right corner of Amazon.com, there was a sign-out link that said, "Not Christ...?"
- kagamine 10y ago
  I've seen that too, "Welcome Christ..."
- SmellyGeekBoy 10y ago
  Heh, mine has always just been my first initial. "Welcome, R!". Also when I buy Kindle ebooks the default option is "Send to R's Kindle". I have no idea where this info is stored as the details on my billing / shipping addresses have my correct (full) name.
kagamine 10y ago
Windows had this length limit all the up to and including Win8, my work login which included a 3 letter domain and backslash was too long for Windows, so they cut the last 3 letters of my name off so that I could be logged in. It's made logging in to to some work services difficult, I'm not always sure they are asking for full ID like email address, or the truncated version.
- in_the_sticks 10y ago
  10 isn't much better if you're using a Microsoft account. My email follows the format "fmlastname@gmail.com" (and is coincidentally the exact same character count). My user directory gets shortened to "fmlas".

tim333 10y ago

Same thing for Hacker News - you can't change your username and keep your karma. I guess the designers just don't design for that. https://www.quora.com/Why-cant-I-change-my-username-on-Hacker-News https://www.quora.com/Why-cant-I-change-my-username-on-Hacke...

mayoff 10y ago
I wouldn't want an HN user to be able to ditch her reputation while keeping her karma.
- axlprose 10y ago
  Perhaps not in that case, but regardless, this is the kind of thing should be designed in deliberately as a feature (with an option to bypass it under special circumstances), rather than some accidental/arbitrary technical limitation just because the dev team didn't bother to implement the ability to update the field for whatever reason.
- CM30 10y ago
  Given your profile shows all your comments and submissions (and would likely still show them if only the name was changed), I'm not sure what the big deal is here.
  - mayoff 10y ago
    You learn to recognize the names of active users that post in threads you're interested in. I shouldn't be able to ditch that recognition but keep my karma, and you shouldn't have to look through my history to see if I'm someone you previously recognized.
    - CM30 10y ago
      Eh, maybe I don't see it. I mean, I use a lot of internet forums running scripts like XenForo and IPB, and those let you change your 'display name' whenever the hell you like. Yet I still recognise everyone perfectly fine. There are people on my forums that change their display name, avatar and signature on a weekly basis. I still recognise them just fine. Same works on Discord too. There you can change your name whenever the hell you feel like it. Again, doesn't stop most people recognising you.

traviscj 10y ago

If this is the type of error you want to minimize, NATO phonetic alphabet [1] is worth learning. (Amateur radio is a good place to practice, though I'll admit I'm a bit rusty.) I actually kinda enjoy these minor discrepancies, because it exposes who has sold my customer data and to whom -- though I've never gone as far as giving anyone intentionally incorrect data with this purpose in mind. I remember my parents also being amused with these copied mistakes, and with greater frequency. Seems plausible that the error rate goes down when most of my utilities/accounts were self-created online instead of typed in from a handwritten form or during an onboarding phonecall. [1]: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/NATO_phonetic_alphabet https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/NATO_phonetic_alphabet

cyberferret 10y ago
Ironically (being a former pilot), I DID use radio phonetics when spelling out my name - I just wish ALL call centre staff used the same baseline too.. :) Me: That's ABCD as in Alpha, Bravo, Charlie, Delta. Them: So, that's Alpha, Burger, er, Charles, Diamond??
- ajford 10y ago
  That's one of my pet peeves... There's an official phonetic letter system, why don't they train these people in call centers to use them? My last job used radios for site communication, and everyone had to use the NATO phonetics, and was provided with a cheat sheet for learning. You'd think that would be something they could tape up in every cube in a call center...
  - unscaled 10y ago
    Or better yet, upgrade our phone system to bleeding-edge high-fidelity CD quality with 44.1khz and 16 bits. It's not a natural law that phone audio quality has to suck.
viraptor 10y ago
Even with a phonetic alphabet, you can still run into issues. Some people are just surprised when they hear it. "P for Papa" / "was that P as in Patrick?" Sigh... I'm seriously considering changing my surname to something that's trivial to understand in English.

brokenmachine 10y ago

I had a similar experience with an Australian ISP, although not with a typo. When I moved house I had to make up a new username/email. They couldn't just change my address, they had to create a whole new account. I'm looking at you, TPG. Truth be told, they have been a fine ISP, other than that WTF.

kagamine 10y ago
Similarly, my job lets me claim a part of the monthly internet bill as a work-from-home expense, but my ISP cost me 6 months expenses because they couldn't transfer the account to my name from my SO's. Same last name, same address. To start a new account they wanted a sign up fee equal to about 3 months of said expenses. Employer would not accept a copy of the bill in my SO's name (same surname, same address) citing tax fraud, which surely would have been our own breach of law if we both had been making the same claim on the same bill. Bureaucracy won again. Until we got a different operator at the ISP who worked out that they could add my name as if the account was landlord & renter scenario, so there could be an owner and another who was responsible for payment.

Karlozkiller 10y ago

My friend was trying to get an account with his ISP to his apartment. The ISP got data from the landlord, my friend noticed that he was in fact getting internet for another apartment completely. He first told them to cancel the deal, then tried again, same wrong apartment number registered, he called the ISP and the response was, "yes we know it's the wrong one, but we've mapped that apartment to your apartment on our side, so all is good." How would it play out legally if I sign a contract where delivery is to be made to X but I want it to Y, but they tell me to sign it anyways because they can fix it in their end. I mean, what I signed would not be what I wanted, how so I prove this if my wish is not fulfilled?

trueSlav 10y ago

> I am amazed that a lot of systems don't allow changing of information once entered. Common in many underengineered systems as it shifts the responsibility from engineers to the users. When you have a set of records that were created based on and depend on (a combination of) values from some other records, you have two options: a) disable editing of the originals (tell the user to "just create new items" or b) introduce versioning. a) is fine until it isn't and creating a "new items" is a complex task or depends on other tasks. b) is not easy to implement into existing systems.. so..

luca_ing 10y ago

> Oh, too bad - once that username is created, it is there for life. So what happens if you change your name, e.g. because of marriage? Twitch.

eganist 10y ago

> I am amazed that a lot of systems don't allow changing of information once entered. For systems where cell-level change logging on the order of years is a requirement, this doesn't surprise me. Many providers would rather prohibit edits rather than risk having to greatly expand logging requirements.