29 ms·
Name: Illegitimate
- postfuturist 15y agoEvery fraud prevention scheme is going to have false positives, so there's no excuse for not providing the user with an appeal process.
- bluetidepro 15y agoI 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 15y agoThis blog post is quite old. They do have such an appeal system in place now. http://i.imgur.com/xQNvz.jpg http://i.imgur.com/xQNvz.jpg
- maqr 15y agoFacebook'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).
- guelo 15y agoA 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.
- rmc 15y agoAnd this is why your fake account should be used only for testing. You don't want to block things for your company.
- saurik 15y agoThey added official support for test accounts five years ago. https://developers.facebook.com/blog/post/35/ https://developers.facebook.com/blog/post/35/
- lubutu 15y agoThis reminds me of Patrick McKenzie's article "Falsehoods Programmers Believe About Names". http://www.kalzumeus.com/2010/06/17/falsehoods-programmers-believe-about-names/ http://www.kalzumeus.com/2010/06/17/falsehoods-programmers-b...
- pwf 15y agoIf 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 15y agoShould 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?
- alanh 15y agoWhat would they enter into _any_ computer system as their name?
- guelo 15y agoYea, they got screwed over by the Unicode Consortion, don't go blaming programmers for that.
- gerrit 15y agoJapanese computer systems are often not using Unicode but are based on other encodings like shift-jis. Even if it wasn't for historical characters that aren't part of Unicode, this will probably stay that way because of the inefficiencies of encoding Asian text in e.g. UTF8. That's part of the reason the ruby programming language didn't have proper Unicode support for a long time (and now supports arbitrary encodings for its strings, not just Unicode ones)
- sriramk 15y agoFB'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 15y agoI'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.
- ojbyrne 15y agoThis is from 2006. Is it even still accurate?
- Posibyte 15y agoIt 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.
- ojbyrne 15y agoI 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.
- Mz 15y agoA 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.
- evincarofautumn 15y agoYour story reminds me of Sal Esposito of Boston, who was summoned for jury duty despite the problematic fact of being a housecat.
- Mz 15y agoMy 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.
- toddkaufmann 15y agoYou need to have a daughter and name her the same. Then you can be II. And she can be Jr. III
- evincarofautumn 15y agoGlad you brought that up—my father is a third, and my mother didn’t change her name when they married, so they both have their share of name-handling issues. Makes me almost glad to be boring old Jon W. Purdy.
- Mz 15y ago
- TazeTSchnitzel 15y agoNull is a name, Fake is a name, almost anything could be. Don't make assumptions.
- Bobby_Tables 15y agoOk, 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 15y agoJennifer 8 Lee? http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Jennifer_8._Lee http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Jennifer_8._Lee
- orbitingpluto 15y agoWell 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 15y agoThis is from 2006. I'm sure their fake name detection is much more sophisticated by now.
- SideburnsOfDoom 15y agoWhat evidence makes you sure?
- thenonsequitur 15y agoThe 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 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 http://www.facebook.com/help/contact/?id=237843336274237. You have to upload a government-issued ID to get the account.
- chris_wot 15y agoAs 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.
- uptown 15y agoIs there some other gender I'm unaware of?
- derleth 15y agoThere are people who don't identify with a gender and aren't going to be included in any list of them you'll be able to come up with. Don't bother saying "What if I check between their legs?" or anything like that, because gender and sex are two different things that are merely strongly correlated in most people.
- joshmlewis 15y agoI love how this came out of the Null threads comments. EDIT: link http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=3900727 http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=3900727
- jonah 15y agoESPN has this pretty interesting commercial about having the same name as a celebrity: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=WxBBN3ZnYeU http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=WxBBN3ZnYeU
- apike 15y agoA 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 15y agoSamir: 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 15y agoMy 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 15y agoMy 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 15y agoI had to look this up its kind of funny the complete list of banned names is here http://outsports.com/nfl/2005/0301nflshopnaughtywords.htm 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)
- rmc 15y agoSounds 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 15y agoAnybody surprised that she doesn't use yahoo mail?
- Wilya 15y agoSince 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 http://www.facebook.com/help/?faq=212848065405122
- chris_wot 15y agoMan - 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 http://www.surnamedb.com/Surname/Fake
- HaloZero 15y agoI own Ivan Ooze and Rita Repulsa facebook accounts. Apparently ooze is fine for a last name
- ctdonath 15y agoOnce I entered my town name of "Cumming" on a web page, and it objected with "my, what colorful language."
- paulschreiber 15y agoYears 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.
- derleth 15y 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 15y agoWhile 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-tree-software http://stackoverflow.com/questions/6163683/cycles-in-family-...
- dionidium 15y agoIt'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-terra 15y agoDoes this sound anti-free market and pro-regulation? Because I can totally imagine how a lawsuit can suddenly incentivise them.
- mhartl 15y agoSince 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 http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Caterina_Fake You'd think the cofounder of Flickr would be treated with more respect by a computer...