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Quora has blocked me because it doesn't think Theodore Ts'o is my real name

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Re: Quora has blocked me because it doesn't think Theodore Ts'o is my real name

#71

Post by gbog »

seiryuz wrote: post #44

Oh boy, Indonesian here, I only have one name (No last name). Websites that require me to have both first name and last name are the bane of my existence. Quora also blocked me, despite me sending an email to their appeal division with a copy of my ID. In the end I gave up fighting for it.

Yes, I had this issue when working for some administrative software, and other problems like what date of birth do you input for the many people which have unknown date of birth? I have also seen many handwritten "identification papers" which you'd have very hard time deciphering anything from it with some degree of certainty.

We believe our times are more free than past times, but that's only partially true. In some places and in some past periods, people did not have "identification papers" and could still travel the worlds and cross borders (minus the slowness and danger of old times travels).

Re: Quora has blocked me because it doesn't think Theodore Ts'o is my real name

#72

Post by enraged_camel »

manojlds wrote: post #69
emsy wrote: post #65

It baffles me that Quora is so successful despite their closed approach. You can't use a pseudonym and can't see questions unless you login (there are workarounds, but I'm talking about normal users). They also seemingly block archive.org from archiving their content. Stack Exchange on the other hand has none of these drawbacks.

You cannot compare Quora and Stack Exchange. Quora thrives on stupid questions that really don't have a well defined answer.

I don't think it's fair to qualify the questions as "stupid," unless you want to make the argument that every subjective question with a qualitative answer is stupid.

The two communities are vastly different and serve different purposes. It's really as simple as that.

Re: Quora has blocked me because it doesn't think Theodore Ts'o is my real name

#73

Post by enraged_camel »

stormy wrote: post #27
danieltillett wrote: post #24

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Stormy did your parents choose your name or did you?

Easiest way to answer is with Quora itself: https://www.quora.com/What-is-the-story-behind-Stormy-Shippy...

Thank you for sharing. By the way, your mother is a very talented writer! That was a pleasure to read.

Re: Quora has blocked me because it doesn't think Theodore Ts'o is my real name

#74

Post by cpayne »

emsy wrote: post #65

It baffles me that Quora is so successful despite their closed approach. You can't use a pseudonym and can't see questions unless you login (there are workarounds, but I'm talking about normal users). They also seemingly block archive.org from archiving their content. Stack Exchange on the other hand has none of these drawbacks.

This depends very much on how you measure success. Remember, News Corp valued MySpace for an $580 million.

I think both (Quora and Stack Exchange) have plateaued to some level.

Neither see the insane growth they originally had.

Re: Quora has blocked me because it doesn't think Theodore Ts'o is my real name

#75

Post by qznc »

lucaspiller wrote: post #51
tedmiston wrote: post #37

Earlier quoted context omitted.

The only feasible way to handle a name given that, at least what I can think of, is a single unbounded textbox that's also optional. Actually, I guess it really must be a foreign key M{0,}:N as a many-to-many to allow for having multiple names.

If you require users to divulge their real name (i.e. financial institutions), it's probably a better idea to have two fields: - Your legal name - What you'd like us to call you

Plus one for sorting. You often want to sort by last name, but that is different than the other two text strings.

Re: Quora has blocked me because it doesn't think Theodore Ts'o is my real name

#76

Post by raarts »

thaumasiotes wrote: post #46
franciscop wrote: post #41

As a Spaniard, I have 3-word first name and 2 family names. No middle name. Now shove that into a non-space-enabled, 2 inputs web form. For plane tickets which basically could leave me stranded in any country. I normally get some trouble trying to retrieve them in the airport in those auto-check-in machines that are being deployed all around Asia. I mean, they can spend thousands of dollars in those machines but don'…

This is particularly odd because multi-word last names aren't exactly obscure in the US. Here are some famous people: van der Waals, von Neumann, de Soto, van Gogh, da Vinci... We have a sizable Italian community domestically, too, plus lots of history of Dutch and German settlement. And then we have lots of Mexicans, who, intuitively enough, use the Spanish system of double surnames. But somehow they all get shoehor…

Where is that? Dutch so I'm interested.

Re: Quora has blocked me because it doesn't think Theodore Ts'o is my real name

#77

Post by thaumasiotes »

raarts wrote: post #76
thaumasiotes wrote: post #46

Earlier quoted context omitted.

This is particularly odd because multi-word last names aren't exactly obscure in the US. Here are some famous people: van der Waals, von Neumann, de Soto, van Gogh, da Vinci... We have a sizable Italian community domestically, too, plus lots of history of Dutch and German settlement. And then we have lots of Mexicans, who, intuitively enough, use the Spanish system of double surnames. But somehow they all get shoehor…

Where is that? Dutch so I'm interested.

New York was a Dutch colony. They stayed when the English conquered it.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Dutch_colonization_of_the_Amer...

Re: Quora has blocked me because it doesn't think Theodore Ts'o is my real name

#78

Post by evilzombie »

A while ago I asked my GP to change my title of address from "Mr" to "Ms". It turns out whatever system the NHS (or possibly just my GP's surgery) uses to keep their records absolutely didn't expect that and has no provision to handle it.

I bet it's perfectly possible to change from "Ms" to "Mrs" or even from "Mr" to "Fr" or "Dr" but try to go from "Mr" to "Ms" and the whole thing HCFs. So there's now two records for me in the NHS database one for a "Mr" me and one for a "Ms" me.

It's confusing for medical peeps who need to access my records and could potentially lead to some humiliation for me (though usually people tend to assume there's some error in the system and don't pry any further).

I've done the same thing with my bank and there was no trouble at all. It's just the NHS so far.

On the plus side if I could spawn a few such doppelganger records I might even get some protection against people gathering "metadata" on myself.

Re: Quora has blocked me because it doesn't think Theodore Ts'o is my real name

#79

Post by evilzombie »

Come to think of it, why do first/middle/last names need separate fields in a database, in terms of bookkeeping?

Why do I absolutely need to be filed as [Ms] [Evil] [Z.] [Ombie]? Wouldn't [Ms Evil Z. Ombie] do?

I don't even see how a family name relates you to your own parents when it's very likely there may be a few thousands, even millions of people with your last name, and even with your own combination of two or three names.

Does it make any difference when someone is searching for you if they do a search for [Mr] [John] [Smith], rather than a [Mr John Smith]? It's only a combination of name and address that can (at best hope) to disambiguate two people with the exact same name and there's no reason to try and do that in a field-by-field manner. If you can match one string without spaces you can match n strings with n-1 spaces right?

In fact why do we absolutely need more than one line for a full address? That just causes more problems than it solves, doesn't it?

Re: Quora has blocked me because it doesn't think Theodore Ts'o is my real name

#80

Post by bambax »

pix64 wrote: post #57
overgard wrote: post #23

I'm always amazed by the lack of historical perspective that "real name" policies entail. Like, holy shit, how many historical people used pseudonyms well before the internet because impactful speech can be a very dangerous thing to the speaker. And yes I know you can be anonymous on Quora, but that's only useful if you trust that no government entities can lean on Quora for information. (HINT: shouldn't trust that).…

The solution is to choose a "normal" pseudonym.

Exactly. I use Quora very rarely but every time I choose a plain fake name and it has always worked with zero hassle.

(I need a new one because many times I don't remember the other one or the password associated with it).

The only thing "real name policies" do is annoy people with unusual names; they can't do anything against people using fake names on purpose.

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