Stakeholder: We have users who are putting like “John and Mary” on their membership’s first name field. Can we restrict that field so they can’t do that?

Me: But what if that user does identify as “John and Mary”?

Besides, what’s to stop any user from taking out the “and” and making it “John Mary” so they can get around input validation for words like “and”?

Send them this
https://kalzumeus.com/2010/06/...

It's falsehoods people, especially programmers, have about names. In short a name should be considered a decorative text field in almost all cases and should not be used for any real analysis as you will invariably not think of a corner case of a name.

As a conclusion to this idea let me ask you is the name McKayla the same name as Mckayla?

@prodigy214

*X Æ A-Xii

also, her father? It's a boy afaik

I've had someone put UTF8 characters in the bloody field before.

A downstream system really didn't appreaciate it 😂

Eg: Jσԋɳ Sɱιƚԋ

@adhdeveloper That’s another thing. Apparently stakeholder has some silent matching protocol that looks at names and uses that to decide if there’s a new user or duplicate. When I heard that, I was wondering if I should just quit.

@C0D4 I’ve had Korean characters come in through the first and last name fields. No one in my downstream has complained about that. But they complain about a “John and Mary” input for the first name. 🤷

As a site note, the same @adhdeveloper said about names applies for addresses as well. In Iceland, you can even send letters to remote places by drawing a map on the letter ( https://mobile.twitter.com/loriskum... ).
There are also some examples written here https://mjt.me.uk/posts/... and also https://wiesmann.codiferes.net/word...

@C0D4 well, tell me!
recently a website had the audacity to tell me "please match the required pattern" when I typed my surname. Should've complained to my ancestors not me

What did the Stakeholder think was the real issue? Just aesthetics or was this something that caused confusion for customer service or doormen who looked at membership cards or something like that?

@jiraTicket It’s one membership per person. “John and Mary” are two people trying to use one membership. Stakeholder thinks those users are trying to cheat the system. I think it’s not a website issue and this requires manual catching. And going back to my initial question, what if there really is a person who wants to be “John and Mary”? Who am I to limit how a user wants to identify?