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When thebiglebow.ski is blocked by Facebook

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Re: When thebiglebow.ski is blocked by Facebook

#81
post #65
post #57

Earlier quoted context omitted.

By definition there is no legal middle names here in Finland (all of the 1 to 4 names given to you are called "first name" in the law). And thus all of your names will be in the passport too. Filling some foreign (or poorly done/ported local) it system forms can be bit of a guess work. Also as a bonus space " " is a legal character in a name. Both "Jukka Pekka" and "Jukka-Pekka" are valid names (also you could have 2…

> "Jukka Pekka" [...] also you could have 2 names "Jukka" and "Pekka" How is that distinguished in legal documents/while registering the name/...?

In most important official documents name is not the only identifier as you also add the national identification number. I guess in most other use cases you just trust humans to get it right.

As for how to register such a name correctly for a baby I have no clue. Also you don't have to give the baby a name at birth (you have 60 days) but the national identification number is given to the baby at birth (it is just date of birth, sequence number and a checksum character). All I know is that I have a colleague which such a name and have seen people before with space instead of - on a 2 part name

edit: How we usually do forms for this stuff is just 2 fields. One for all of your first names and the second for your family name(s) (you can have multiple for example both of your parents or some foreign with de/von/etc). Validation is mostly "check that they are not empty"

Re: When thebiglebow.ski is blocked by Facebook

#82

Could it be related to Zwarte Piet? Perhaps Facebook is just banning everything containing "Zwart" in its content, just to be on the safe side.

I'd hope not, that would be a completely wrong-headed decision by them as "Zwarte" isn't an uncommon surname/surname part, just like "Black" isn't uncommon in English-speaking countries.

Which of course doesn't preclude Facebook from making a completely wrong-headed decision.

Re: When thebiglebow.ski is blocked by Facebook

#83
post #20

Earlier quoted context omitted.

In this context, Dutch refers to the country The Netherlands, not the language. Based on my non-linguist opinion, I would say you're correct. Dutch people tend to not capitalise their Ds in surnames. When only mentioning the surname, it is treated as a mini-sentence, hence the capitalisaiton. In northern Belgium (AKA Flanders), Dutch speakers tend to capitalise their Ds in surnames, so you would see "De Zwart" regard…

In Spain we don't have so many surnames prefixed with particles, but we do have some (e.g. "Del Río") and the capitalization also works as you describe for Dutch. It makes sense: when you say Juan del Río it's obvious that it's a surname, but if you just said "del Río" without context, the "del" could be confused with the common word.

Exactly. In the Dutch example, "de Zwart" in the middle of a sentence would be a misspelling of "de Zwarte", meaning "the Black".

Re: When thebiglebow.ski is blocked by Facebook

#84
post #75
post #71

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Yeah, in the Netherlands we also don't use the "de" and "van" for sorting so it was confusing to find my badge under the "v" at American conferences the first time. Ah well, what can you do? A friend of mine had his FB acount blocked for failing to provide a real name (his last name is "Fun"), ironically after he gave FB a false name they did accept it.

> A friend of mine had his FB acount blocked for failing to provide a real name (his last name is "Fun") Don't they have a process where you can submit a government ID and have your name accepted? Honestly I don't blame the minimum wage person responsible for name screening for flagging a name that is both uncommon and one of the most common adjectives in the English language, if the policy is that fake names aren't…

> I don't blame the minimum wage person responsible for name screening

My expectation is that the person who wrote the code responsible for rejecting my name in the mid-to-late 2000s was paid somewhat more than minimum wage.

Re: When thebiglebow.ski is blocked by Facebook

#85
A big part of this I think is due to "uncommon" TLDs. I had a joke "quiz" .website domain that was insta-blocked by Facebook for no reason and was impossible to get revoked. That was a complete waste of time when the main way I intended for it to get some traction was through Facebook shares.

Re: When thebiglebow.ski is blocked by Facebook

#86
post #28

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I'm not a web developer but whenever this kind of thing happens I just wonder why there isn't a single standard library in every common web language to deal with this and if there is, why it's not being used more often.

There is no need for a libaray, there is just need for a consistent standard. Meaning, if all programms would use UTF-8, fine. But they don't. But character -encoding is somewhat complicated, because there are a lot of languages out there. Some who even need more than 2 bytes per character, so you get special cases, which break on another system etc.

Most programs use something that is compatible with UTF-8. And UTF-8 is also backwards compatible with ASCII which is why A-z usually works. I actually think UTF-16 is the most common. The issues start to arise when three or more code points/bytes are combined into one character/glyph.

Re: When thebiglebow.ski is blocked by Facebook

#87

I think if you work at Facebook, I wonder how you can live with yourself, helping to make the world a worse place. Having worked at Facebook should make you a paria, nobody should hire you. Facebook should be a stain on your resume.

And where do you work? I can probably (almost certainly) find serious ethical lapses in your company, if it's large and/or has been around for a long time. Shaming people based on their perceived associations is just wrong, no matter what those associations.

>Shaming people based on their perceived associations is just wrong, no matter what those associations.

Uh, there's a whole group of people at the end of WWII who would disagree with you.

Re: When thebiglebow.ski is blocked by Facebook

#88
post #28

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I'm not a web developer but whenever this kind of thing happens I just wonder why there isn't a single standard library in every common web language to deal with this and if there is, why it's not being used more often.

Names are too complicated and too personal. The issue is that many developers have an urge to do some 'clever' processing on them when, really, my conclusion is that they should be left alone. Just sanitise them for security purpose and that's it. This is a typical 'less is more' scenario. The best person to write a specific name as it should be is the person the name belongs to, so just let them do it.

> The best person to write a specific name as it should be is the person the name belongs to, so just let them do it.

It's inconvenient to have the person you are writing about copyedit all of your writing. How would that even work?

And if you don't allow them to do that, how do you account for the situation here where Mr de Zwart's name is capitalized differently depending on context? I'm not even sure if I have it right here.

Re: When thebiglebow.ski is blocked by Facebook

#89
post #75
post #71

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Yeah, in the Netherlands we also don't use the "de" and "van" for sorting so it was confusing to find my badge under the "v" at American conferences the first time. Ah well, what can you do? A friend of mine had his FB acount blocked for failing to provide a real name (his last name is "Fun"), ironically after he gave FB a false name they did accept it.

> A friend of mine had his FB acount blocked for failing to provide a real name (his last name is "Fun") Don't they have a process where you can submit a government ID and have your name accepted? Honestly I don't blame the minimum wage person responsible for name screening for flagging a name that is both uncommon and one of the most common adjectives in the English language, if the policy is that fake names aren't…

I know a guy from Africa named Test. That's a no-go on Facebook's platform so he is known by Tesst there.

Re: When thebiglebow.ski is blocked by Facebook

#90
post #57

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I always worry with plane tickets because I have a middle name on my passport but many buying services don't take middle names into account. Also the name of my town has a "Ą" letter in it, which also is problematic in online forms and I often just write A instead just to be on the safe side.

By definition there is no legal middle names here in Finland (all of the 1 to 4 names given to you are called "first name" in the law). And thus all of your names will be in the passport too. Filling some foreign (or poorly done/ported local) it system forms can be bit of a guess work. Also as a bonus space " " is a legal character in a name. Both "Jukka Pekka" and "Jukka-Pekka" are valid names (also you could have 2…

> "all of the 1 to 4 names given to you are called "first name" in the law"

Is 4 a hard maximum? Because in Dutch it's not unheard of to have more. Not common (most people have 1 or 2), but at least one famous politician had 5 first names.

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