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Life on the Internet Is Hard When Your Last Name Is 'Butts'

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131–140 of 149 posts

Re: Life on the Internet Is Hard When Your Last Name Is 'Butts'

#131
post #114
post #41

I have an ø in my name. It is especially annoying when entering payment details and I have to input my name as it appears on my credit card. It is surprisingly often that only ascii is accepted. I would guess the anglo-internet is hell if you're from Asia.

In Germany, transliterations are widespread and officially accepted. Ö=OE, Ä=AE, Ü=UE, ß=SS makes it fine to write Hübner as Huebner even in the passport and other official documents. I wonder why other countries do not allow transliterations as a legal way to deal with anglo-centric character sets?

Romanization/anglicization can be tough for many languages. Thai for example has vowels that do not have an equivalent in English, and presents the added difficulty of being tonal, which means even if the pronunciation is anglicized, the tonality will be lost. Former example, the name of the former king of Thailand was typically written "Bhumibol Adulyadej" but the pronunciation is closer to the alternate "Phumiphon Adunyadet" and neither really hits all the notes in the way it actually sounds when spoken (although I admit I can't think of a better way to write it in the English alphabet).

https://upload.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/commons/1/19/Bhumibol...

Re: Life on the Internet Is Hard When Your Last Name Is 'Butts'

#132
Its entirely possible to be profane without the use of profane words. I am surprised this didnt get a mention from Vice:

http://habitatchronicles.com/2007/03/the-untold-history-of-t...

TL;DR "We spent several weeks building a UI that used pop-downs to construct sentences, and only had completely harmless words – the standard parts of grammar and safe nouns like cars, animals, and objects in the world."

"We thought it was the perfect solution, until we set our first 14-year old boy down in front of it. Within minutes he’d created the following sentence:

I want to stick my long-necked Giraffe up your fluffy white bunny.

Re: Life on the Internet Is Hard When Your Last Name Is 'Butts'

#133

The name I was born with, Burkimsher, is always misspelled when people type it. I had a chance to choose my own Chinese name. I had friends with amusing names: Yi-ting was eating, Wei-ting was waiting, and let's not mention Shi-ting. Those are all quite normal names there! I laughed at first, but realised that I remembered their names much better than other friends. So I chose my name to be 台平, Tai-ping. Because I'm…

I would choose tri-ing or sli-ping for obvious reasons.

Re: Life on the Internet Is Hard When Your Last Name Is 'Butts'

#134
post #33

The article mentions human moderators as a solution. Maybe, unless they're part of a pathologically awful system like Wikipedia. You have a username policy: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wikipedia:Username_policy You have a notice board for blatant violations of policy (although it gets used for a lot of other stuff): https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wikipedia:Usernames_for_admini... You have a holding pen for usernames…

Hmmm, I mean, on Wikipedia, does anyone want to see user names that aren’t pseudonymous?

I think the policy is more likely to favor names that are not identifiable in the real world.

So nonsense like “Snarf_Yorble” is preferred to “Danny_DeVito” even if Danny DeVito himself is trying to help write an article about the TV show, Taxi, by citing some good sources to fill in blanks and rectify some subtle errors via the talk page.

Favoring handles and nicknames keeps attention focused on the content or data, and not the authors, to retain a degree of objectivity. Merit badges are there, not to promote credit, but credible accuracy and reliable behavior.

Re: Life on the Internet Is Hard When Your Last Name Is 'Butts'

#135
An interesting project would be to consult with cultural anthropologists and create a localization library for names. That way once a person selects the appropriate country we can just consult the localization for name formatting and cultural taboos then validate based on that.

Re: Life on the Internet Is Hard When Your Last Name Is 'Butts'

#136
It's really amazing how often I meet people today who think world filters are in any way, shape or form effective against abuse and trolling.

And this isn't niche software either, this happens in AAA game releases, all the time. I've encountered this in software that had been developed for millions of dollars.

Re: Life on the Internet Is Hard When Your Last Name Is 'Butts'

#137
post #41

I have an ø in my name. It is especially annoying when entering payment details and I have to input my name as it appears on my credit card. It is surprisingly often that only ascii is accepted. I would guess the anglo-internet is hell if you're from Asia.

Perhaps the letter should be changed to the bank’s local language? What if your name was 細分?

Re: Life on the Internet Is Hard When Your Last Name Is 'Butts'

#138
post #136

It's really amazing how often I meet people today who think world filters are in any way, shape or form effective against abuse and trolling. And this isn't niche software either, this happens in AAA game releases, all the time. I've encountered this in software that had been developed for millions of dollars.

I always assumed it was just to filter usernames in an aesthetic sense...less so about behavior.

Sadly most lists of unpleasant words are pretty aggressive.

Re: Life on the Internet Is Hard When Your Last Name Is 'Butts'

#139
post #100

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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

Every extra field on your signup form massively reduces conversion. Otherwise everyone would just do this.

Isn't that a solved problem? Email and password to sign up, everything else after they've bought.

Re: Life on the Internet Is Hard When Your Last Name Is 'Butts'

#140
post #138
post #136

It's really amazing how often I meet people today who think world filters are in any way, shape or form effective against abuse and trolling. And this isn't niche software either, this happens in AAA game releases, all the time. I've encountered this in software that had been developed for millions of dollars.

I always assumed it was just to filter usernames in an aesthetic sense...less so about behavior. Sadly most lists of unpleasant words are pretty aggressive.

>Sadly most lists of unpleasant words are pretty aggressive.

Either that or they contain words that look like someone was sitting in front of the screen and making a scrunched face trying to remember any more offensive words.

They're also usually very US-centric and completely ignore other cultures, languages or societies.

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