Dear American Website Owner • Hacker News Board

Re: Dear American Website Owner

#61

Post by cglee » Wed, Mar 31, 2010, 5:37 PM UTC

TomOfTTB wrote: post #16

Dear Foreigner, Okay it’s probably time to come clean. In reality the problem you highlight is all a secret plot to frustrate you and hence make you less effective and unable to compete with us in the global economy. We were all told to do so through coded messages that are embedded into episodes of American Idol (I bet you thought all that stuff Paula Abdul said was just drunken babbling) It’s all part of a far reac…

How does this reply add value? The blog post presents a problem that I (being an American) rarely even think about. I wanted to see how others deal with this issue. WTF is this reply doing?

Re: Dear American Website Owner

#62

Post by Semiapies » Wed, Mar 31, 2010, 5:38 PM UTC

tosiabunio wrote: post #31

cwbrandsma wrote: post #28

Actually, as a web site owner, for a number of my sites, they are INTENTIONALLY USA only. Sorry that you happened to stumble across them, but I either do not care about your business, don't want to deal with the hassle (international shipped, phone, regulations, etc), or legally cannot serve your area.

Acually, as typical American, you are unable to read and understand such short text. It is directed to those website owners who do want to deal with the hassle you don't care about. "The moment you put a "country" field in your form, two things should happen:" - that sentence should give you a clue.

"Acually, as typical American"

It helps, when mocking a people, to convey such mockery through proper use of their language. ;)

More seriously, there's no need to douche up the conversation by throwing around slurs against nationalities.

EDIT: Apparently people disagree on that need. Ah, well.

Re: Dear American Website Owner

#63

Post by Retric » Wed, Mar 31, 2010, 5:39 PM UTC

zeeone wrote: post #53

njharman wrote: post #45

I've argued many times for making address one big text field. Let people who live in the country, who own the address, format it how they know it should be formatted.

Which would make so much more sense in the first place. I don't even know why did they make them in separate fields in the first place. To give you a huge listbox of all states to choose from?! Oh, wow!

While accepting generic address is nice, if you actually use the address for anything actually knowing the Country and Zip+4 for the US gives you a lot of power for things like advertizing campaigns. Also, the chances of a user entering bad data when given an unformatted field increased dramatically.

My suggestion is to give the option to enter generic information but don't let that become the default.

Re: Dear American Website Owner

#64

Post by pixelbath » Wed, Mar 31, 2010, 5:43 PM UTC

We've been told for years that database normalization is good. Removing data redundancy is good. This is one reason forms are broken into so many separate fields as discretely as possible.

That said, once a company decides to do business outside their country of origin, some serious rethinking of customer-facing forms (and fields, if applicable) is in order.

Re: Dear American Website Owner

#65

Post by jwr » Wed, Mar 31, 2010, 5:43 PM UTC

I should probably clarify something, given how heated the discussion is becoming.

I could have written the same thing as a nerdy techie article, pointing out flaws in input validation. Do you think this would have gotten my point across? How many people would have read that article? Would it have made it to Hacker News?

Look: this is not a rant about Americans. It just so happens that US has developed most of the internet as we know it and it just so happens that most of e-commerce happens there. I'm sure any number of websites in other countries are guilty of similar sins, but you have to start somewhere.

The point is, we should start thinking more carefully about how we validate forms and store user data in that "global economy" everyone is bragging about.

Re: Dear American Website Owner

#66

Post by tokenadult » Wed, Mar 31, 2010, 5:43 PM UTC

dionidium wrote: post #34

lutorm wrote: post #32

What's the point of having a state field at all? Isn't there a unique mapping between zip code and state? About the phone numbers, my favorite annoyance is when companies, who always are fond of making stupid mnemonics out of the letters corresponding to their phone number, don't let me enter my mnemonic for my phone number, which I picked from Google Voice specifically because it makes my name, but insists on number…

What's the point of having a state field at all? Isn't there a unique mapping between zip code and state? No. Zip codes may cross state lines.

Zip codes may cross state lines.

Example, please?

Re: Dear American Website Owner

#67

Post by Semiapies » Wed, Mar 31, 2010, 5:45 PM UTC

whyenot wrote: post #43

Semiapies wrote: post #33

Earlier quoted context omitted.

To be blunt, inputs you don't validate are inputs that will be entered wrong a significant portion of the time. Other concerns may override this for many fields, but unusable phone numbers are generally considered a problem.

Yes, but if you over-validate you also risk losing sales. What to do doesn't seem obvious at all, at least to me. You'd want to do some kind of cost-benefit analysis Also, wouldn't a phone number in effect be validated for most online credit card purchases? I thought credit card processor often match the phone number you provide to the phone number on record for your account to prevent fraud. Skip the javascript vali…

It's not universally true, no.

If you under-validate, you risk sales you can't complete. Mind, that's less dire when you have email addresses - but we know the problems with trying to validate those on forms.

Re: Dear American Website Owner

#68

Post by tokenadult » Wed, Mar 31, 2010, 5:48 PM UTC

showerst wrote: post #58

joshfinnie wrote: post #46

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I am not sure that is completely true. I thought ZIP codes could not cross state lines (at least in the US). And after looking at them, I couldn't find any that were not unique.[ http://www.aggdata.com/free/zip-code ] Edit: Sorry, There are a few that cross state lines, when using the first two digits as the state code. However, each ZIP code is unique to a town; therefore, one could use it in the above scenario.

Wikipedia used to have a list of them, I remember there being at least 5, possibly more.

Google brought me to this article; I'm showing the jump to near where the issue is mentioned.

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/ZIP_code#By_geography

Re: Dear American Website Owner

#69

Post by detst » Wed, Mar 31, 2010, 5:49 PM UTC

skybrian wrote: post #9

awolf wrote: post #3

I wish author was a little more constructive here. What phone number pattern would he recommend we use?

For phone numbers, this library might help: http://code.google.com/p/libphonenumber/

Very nice. Anyone have links for other languages? Python and ruby in particular.

My take is that we need to validate (people screw up and often), ask them to verify when we can't validate and proceed after verification.

Re: Dear American Website Owner

#70

Post by Semiapies » Wed, Mar 31, 2010, 5:51 PM UTC

jwr wrote: post #65

I should probably clarify something, given how heated the discussion is becoming. I could have written the same thing as a nerdy techie article, pointing out flaws in input validation. Do you think this would have gotten my point across? How many people would have read that article? Would it have made it to Hacker News? Look: this is not a rant about Americans. It just so happens that US has developed most of the int…

"Would it have made it to Hacker News?"

Heaven knows, we never see nerdy, technical material on this site.

Are you trying to "clarify" or "justify"?

EDIT: Serious question. At the same time you're saying "this is not a rant about Americans", you're also saying but none of you would have paid attention if I hadn't made it one.