Another episode in the life of having a é in my name, when people don't accept "non English letters" whatever that means?. Would you tell Beyoncé she can't use her name on your site?
I got a whole talk on the topic, by the way: https://stephaniewalter.design/blog/hello-my-name-is-stephanie-talk-encoding-special-characters-issues-poor-user-experience/
It's 2024, this is a new social media, so no "old data base legacy" kind of issue. At some point, people building sites, you need to understand that English isn't the only language in the world, the world, and people's names go beyond what you so nicely call "English letters".
Jun 6, 2024, 8:33 AM@stephaniewalter Don’t worry, even 100% “English” names can contain “illegal” characters. Or have an “unacceptable” length. (Changing one’s name to be hyphenated upon getting married? Expect trouble.)
Jun 6, 2024, 9:35 AM@stephaniewalter Was? Na ja, ich bin wirklich überrascht. Wie ich naïve war...
@stephaniewalter Developers are bad at regexes, so they should just stop validating things.
@stephaniewalter Have you considered changing your name to "Chad Pancreas"? https://brucelawson.co.uk/2022/inclusive-name-inputs-because-not-everyone-is-called-chad-pancreas/
@brucelawson @stephaniewalter came here to post 'falsehoods programmers believe about names', found this instead, much better
@brucelawson tempting but it would make my mum sad 😢
@brucelawson Hey wait a minute…
@counteractor what?
@brucelawson You have encoding errors in that blog post. Thought it was ironic.
@stephaniewalter ha, great writeup, and hits very close to home. mine's on my last name, and changes the pronunciation quite a f*ckin bit.
fun quirk: my last name is technically different on my french and canadian papers. now guess which one managed to put the accent on
@stephaniewalter
Names of people cannot be invalid.
Jun 6, 2024, 9:58 AM@stephaniewalter at what point do you just go around telling everyone your name is U3TDqXBoYW5pZQ==
@tay hello my name is Drop Table 😁
@stephaniewalter I’ve always liked this fact about the character actor Željko Ivanek.
@rossfloate it's all about the small details, but it counts, it's annoying to have to butcher your own name
I took the easy road and simply dropped the caron from my Zs (yes, it's on all of the Zs in my name).
But that's just when I write it down - in person, I like to confuse non-Slavic persons with the true force of the Ž :anidab_left:
@stephaniewalter Never mind names, thinking there are only 26 letters in the English alphabet for “normal” words is naïve.
@stephaniewalter Tell them to copy/paste from symbol.wtf
@stephaniewalter I only have a space in my last name and that is quite difficult already sometimes.
@stephaniewalter An author you might have heard of had same issues decades ago with his main character Elric of Melniboné. Editors and publishers wanted to correct the "é".
And still nowadays, I worked on a book (translated into French) and the US publishers asked us what were those strange symbols hovering over "à" and "é" or "è".
@FredMeurin Should I be worried, that people who publish books, are not aware that, there are characters in other languages, different from their own language? It sounds like a joke, but, it's US people, so, sorry not sorry, I'm not surprised.
I had so many issues with US tools due to my name, but also the fact they assume things like your bank IBAN must be a luxembourgish one, since you live in Luxembourg. Yeah, nah, Revolut, N26, not Lux ones.
@stephaniewalter Well, as some say, "not all publishers", but still, yeah : US people, so no surprise here...
But don't worry, here in France, we do have the same issues since our credit card have one's name on it. Without the hellish symbols. So when you have to put "CC's owner name" in a field, well, you have to skip these for the "acceptable" version. 2024...
I'm a French-Canadian living in the USA. (Naturalized for a while.) I'm lucky not to have an accented letter in my name, but my first name is compounded. Something like:
Jean-Charles Desjardins
My first name is spewed out by various systems as:
Jean C (Sorry. I don't have a middle name, so the C there is misleading.)
JeanCharles (Dafuq happened to the dash?)
Jean Charles (Again, Charles ain't my middle name!)
Jean-charles (You're so cute with your nonsensical capitalization rules.)
And Desjardins sometimes get rendered DesJardins. Nope... that ain't right.
@stephaniewalter Had the same thing this week. In my case, it's "ü" that was illegal to use in the first name field. 🙄
My name gets mangled all the time when I get packages through the mail.
@stephaniewalter I feel your pain.
@stephaniewalter a few friends of mine have a single quote in their name, along with half of Ireland...causes them all kinds of trouble.
@johnefrancis there's an interesting article that I'm putting in my newsletter about auto correct for Irish and other names too, what a giant mess https://www.theguardian.com/technology/article/2024/may/22/people-with-commonly-autocorrected-names-call-for-tech-firms-to-fix-problem