The creator of the well-known board game Scrabble, which a significant portion of my life revolves around, was named Alfred Butts.
Life on the Internet Is Hard When Your Last Name Is 'Butts'
91–100 of 149 posts
Re: Life on the Internet Is Hard When Your Last Name Is 'Butts'
#92A similar problem happens when the name itself is only considered offensive in certain cultures, but is completely benign in the culture of the person with the name. I remember two gaming related incidents where people were blocked from making accounts; one was a south american using "negro" as his username being prevented from creating an account, even though english speakers with the username "black" are fine; the…
Those people probably still don't have it quite as difficult as these two: http://mw.eco.br/ig/prof/ReinhardtAdolfoFuck.htm http://www.nie.edu.sg/profile/chew-shit-fun
Or the former director of Civil Police in the Brazilian state of Goiás (who I believe passed away in 2014):
https://www.policiacivil.go.gov.br/ex-diretores/hitler-musso...
Re: Life on the Internet Is Hard When Your Last Name Is 'Butts'
#93I have dealt with this specific problem before and it is a quite difficult problem. I actually use it as an interview question often for prospective programmers and it is a decent gauge of someone’s general problem solving abilities. If you ask this problem of any programmer generally the people who come up with the common “gotchas” and some suggested solutions quickly are the kind of people that are likely to be able to quickly solve problems in a pragmatic way generically.
The two most difficult parts of this problem are the subset problem and the localization problem.
The subset problem is highlighted by Scunthorpe. When looking for bad words, how do you whitelist the places like Scunthorpe where the subset can contain a bad word? I.E. how can we allow Scunthorpe while also disallowing .:)(B.adw0r3d ?
The localization problem is easily described in this thread as well. In French, ass might mean a completely beningn word that’s completely different from the meaning in English.
In the end the current solutions aren’t great and involve a shit ton of heuristics with a lot of human intervention. I don’t see that changing in the near future.
Re: Life on the Internet Is Hard When Your Last Name Is 'Butts'
#94I had John Fread write in last year. His whole family had learned to be careful picking usernames, and more careful as WAFs and such grew popular.
I'm normally pretty good at this, but I don't get either part of this. What's potentially offensive about a Mr or Mrs Fread? And what's WAF here?
I’m guessing fread looks like an attempt at code injection (fread() is a POSIX C function to read from a file handle, but also present in e.g. PHP), and WAF stands for Web Application Firewall.
Re: Life on the Internet Is Hard When Your Last Name Is 'Butts'
#95Earlier quoted context omitted.
The mods discourage humor because it tends to metastasize into tedious offtopic threads, which I guess is true enough. Readers think they punish bad jokes and reward good ones, but the stupid Butts pun is doing great while the absurdist gem about Leonard Nimoy secretly wanting to be Kirk and living it out for a year in the white pages (and then someone working with him forgetting his name!) was nuked from orbit.
The humor just has to be dry enough to maintain plausible deniability. Kind of like flirting in a corporate setting
Or rubbing your eyes with sandpaper.
Re: Life on the Internet Is Hard When Your Last Name Is 'Butts'
#96A boy named Sue Drop Database Null. Johnny Cash strums
Re: Life on the Internet Is Hard When Your Last Name Is 'Butts'
#97Re: Life on the Internet Is Hard When Your Last Name Is 'Butts'
#98The name "Dick van Dyke" would often get censored by filters in online forums in the 90s.
Re: Life on the Internet Is Hard When Your Last Name Is 'Butts'
#99I'm pretty sure Caterina Fake[1] has talked about problems with signing up for everything from Facebook to buying plane tickets. These names need to be on those "things programmers believe about names that are false" lists closer to the top[2]. [1] - https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Caterina_Fake [2] - https://www.kalzumeus.com/2010/06/17/falsehoods-programmers-...
I actually wrote a full-stack web service to handle people's names, specifically to help avoid situations like this. My best advice: treat people's names as a potentially very long and entirely arbitrary text field. Don't assume anything without their confirmation, even if it seems obvious, because somewhere out there someone's name will violate that assumption. My research did conclude that nearly all names are belo…
Even arbitrary text doesn't cut it -- not all names can be represented in Unicode.
Re: Life on the Internet Is Hard When Your Last Name Is 'Butts'
#100Earlier quoted context omitted.
> since to get someone's first name given their full name I never understood why that's necessary in the first place. Simply have inputs called "full name" and "address" and let people type in whatever, similar to how many websites now have "name" and "title" (as in Mr, Mrs, Reverend, ...), which is a partial and culturally insensitive solution to a similar problem.
The biggest problem with this strategy is it isn't idiomatic to refer to someone by their full name in many contexts. However given its simplicity, and cultural neutrality, a single full name field should be the default choice IMO.
Full name:
Nickname:
and then refer to them by their nickname, which can be whatever they like to be called, in whatever land they come from
and no programmer has to care about human naming conventions ever again