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

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).

I was in a similar situation as you (south Indian with only one name), and after trying to reason with their customer support, I found it easier to just use a fake name. If you think my real name is fake for no good reason, go ahead and have a fake name that "sounds real".

The British royal family have run into the same problem. Traditionally, they use a first name and a title, e.g. "Prince William, Duke of Cambridge". For legal purposes, they occasionally use the surname "Windsor" or "Mountbatten-Windsor". This is applied rather inconsistently - Prince William enlisted in the Air Force as "William Wales".

https://www.royal.uk/royal-family-name

Honest question, are you able to fly? Did you ever attempt to fly to the US?

Germany even had a chancellor with a pseudonym: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Willy_Brandt

The solution is to choose a "normal" pseudonym.

I don't know about Quora's "work with a mod to verify the name" policy works, but I have heard from at least one friend that Facebook makes you give them a scan your driving license or other Government ID in order to show that your slightly unusual name is actually what you say it is.

Which is just absurd. A random social network should never be so powerful as to demand your Government-issued IDs for some bogus "real name" policy that penalizes names like Theodore Ts'o in favor of "normal" ones like John Smith. The day Facebook asks me for one is the day I'm done with it. Same for Quora if their policy is similar.

Stormy did your parents choose your name or did you?

Story behind your name was pretty amazing. Ever find out the story behind his?

In this day and age, with the heavy DS and ML that's going on in companies like GOOG, it's actually not wise to use your real name anyway.

Let them think you're just John Appleseed.

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 shoehorned into hyphenation.

I will even add that what you know as nicknames in other countries are deemed as real names here. My first full name is "Francisco de Paula", but in Spain everyone calls me "Paco" (historical reasons and all) the same as with a handful of other names. But the thing is it doesn't have a nickname status but rather these kind of names are used everyday in professional and personal spaces. I also gave up that fight and for everyone internationally I'm Francisco ( heck I even got http://francisco.io/ ). But that is not even so different as many Chineses/Korean/Vietnamese people choose international names as well that differ from their real name.

This has an interesting parallel to having a spectrum of gender pronouns.

StackExchange? Btw. same here, I used it before it reached it's first million users, even went to few Quora meetups but I blocked the site on notebook two years ago. I feel it became a place for chronic procrastinators and self-promoters + there's very little unique knowledge... as a content researcher, 99 out of 100 I find better information elsewhere.

I added quora.com to my search result spam blacklist for content cloaking back before Google made them tone it down so you'd at least see the text you saw in the search results. It'd take a top-level management change to consider going back.

I was a Top Writer on Quora for two years in a row. I ended up quitting it entirely for a whole laundry list of reasons. Chief among them was the uneven enforcement of rules and manipulation of answer rankings so that people who promote themselves and/or generally post catchy-but-crappy answers always end up at the top for every question and every topic. Quora is more like those "one weird trick" listicle sites than a place to find actual information or insight, and it's quite intentional on their part.

Sounds like you are describing reddit to me :P

I have a friend who, courtesy of some... let's say unique parents, was graced with multiple middle names and then multiple hyphenated (and unhyphenated) family names as her parents divorced, remarried and she moved between households. Then she got married herself and tacked her husband's last name onto the end of it.

Her legal name at this point clocks in at enough words and characters to not fit in most government databases. I've been tempted once or twice to create a similar but fake name to use as a test case for things that handle identity information.

Facebook's policy is so weird. I have a ton of older test accounts that literally include TEST and other such very obvious fake text in the name.

Haha, now I'm curious! Could you please provide some examples of Native American names?

The NHS (or at least my GP's surgery) does not allow you to register as "Dr" and I wouldn't be surprised if they lacked a mechanism to change from "Ms" to "Mrs" (or any ability at all to change the title field).

I suspect they used to use title as a proxy for gender but this wouldn't be very sensible so maybe it's just there for historical purposes or no particular reason.

Admin staff in GP surgeries often don't understand the ID requirements, and also will copper-bottom any regs they do know about.

This can lead to some onerous requirements when people want to change name.

Your GP surgery should have a system for gathering patient feedback (it's something the CQC looks for) so you can try using that.

If you don't get anywhere with their process you could try your local clinical commissioning group.

If you wanted to go the technical route you could ask what software they use, and find a user group for that software to ask how it would be done.

Of course, you shouldn't need to do any of that. It sucks that they're making you jump through hoops.

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.

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

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.

There's a lot of legacy in it.

You usually want the last name separate when you want to be able to sort users alphabetically by their last name instead of their first name or nickname. But this admittedly makes less and less sense in the age of search and monster datasets.

Also: for personalized content. "Hi John" is better than "Hi John Smith" when sending email. There's a gazillion ways to fail extracting the first name when a name doesn't follow a [first] [last] name format.

Names

1. They're separated because other data sinks you share with want them separated, like the tax office.

2. They're separated because people want to call you by your first or last name depending on the situation, and they don't want to force you to fill in every variation. What's your name; what's the name you want us to call you; what's your name we should put on any mail to you; what's your "more formal name" like we'd use if we sued you?

Addresses

2. That is often a requirement of postal offices. They're pretty amazing in that they work at all but a lot of that is because street, suburb, state, country, are often on different lines. (But of course some countries have completely and utterly different differentiations for this, too).

Recently I split some forms out from 'name' to 'firstname' and 'lastname'. An extra column was added to the backend table too.

So why did I do this, go from what you want to something else? What was the evil marketing intent?

Those names also get used by other systems, therefore to create a support ticket in 3rd party system, extra name needed. There is also the small matter of writing back to whomever filled in the form. 'Dear Steve, thanks for applying for the position of blah blah...' becomes possible.

The backend form handling is there to build a tidy database so extra fettling goes on. Customer enters 'steve mcdonald' in the 'name' field, but when you email them their tickets you would prefer to have the name as 'Steve McDonald'. Note the titlecasing going on there and the tidying of whitespace. This is a snip if using two fields, a bit more complex otherwise.

Doing this makes it easier when it comes to customer enquiries, the name is the same in the sales order table, the customer database, the newsletter system somewhere in the cloud and in the helpdesk system. Simple.

Also important to the change was the reality of how web forms work. You can get autofill to do a good job of 'firstname' and 'lastname', it is all there to be clicked 'submit' to if the form autofill helpers are configured correctly in a HTML5 way.

Sometimes the Mr/Mrs option is helpful as you instantly get people's gender. That is why the Mr/Mrs box is there.

Personally I do not put Mr/Mrs in forms, instead I use the 'gender' library to guess the customer's gender based on their IP address (country) and their first name. In this mini-'shadow profile' the gender guess is not disclosed to the customer but it does get pulled through to the reports and the inaccuracy of not knowing whether 'Viv' is a girl or a boy does not matter in the aggregate.

So there you have it, why an 'evolved web form' can move away from a 'name' box to 'firstname' and 'lastname'.

Sorting, queries, personalised content (Hey [first name]!) are some examples.

Which explains Linus Torvalds' comment:

  To me, you'll always just be "tytso"

I certainly learned key informatioon from some of his documentation.

Tragedy of the Commons.

Unfettered free speech is incredibly powerful as long as the preponderance of the community respects it and self-polices. But if such a community grows, over time some selfish actors appear who start gaming the system in a way that makes the community worse for everybody else.

That sets up an incentive to either join inthe gaming or leave, and left unchecked, the community devolves into a smaller core of people being awful and everyone else having decamped either to a newer community that hasn’t been spoiled yet, or to a community that has moderation a/k/a censorship.

Note that we are having this conversation on a platform that has, from the beginning, chosen to moderate speech.

That it looks real to their customers(advertisers) is all that matters.

That's a whole 'nother can of worms concerning participation / nonparticipation elections by various services.

And the question of when a service ought / ought not allow participation.

I'm strongly in the camp of controlling my own personal online interactions. Which is somewhat curious in the case of HN as that's not possible -- there are no user blocks. HN's moderation policies and practices ensure that this is virtually never necessary.

However I've got issues with how and why various online services draw the line at participation. I agree with some of the groups banned from Reddit, for example. I take exception to Imzy's banning my account (largely for being hounded, misrepresented, and harassed by others on the service). I'm exceptionally critical of Google, on Google+, but that's not resulted in repercussions (there are times when an adversary's belief in "the marketplace of ideas" is an advantage).

I'd prefer a world in which relying on access to other's soapboxes and spaces wasn't so necessary.

> Do you think this will cause a ban?

Much like everything, only if they find out. To get an anonymous experience in these websites you'll have to assume a fake identity.

King of Greece has no surname.

People insist in demanding surname, not just for real reasons, but to actually spite him.

Greece even made a law after the king was deposed making surnames mandatory (and then promptly declared the guy noncitizen for illegally not having one)

Yes and where only the elite get the upvotes even if they write a factually incorrect and laughable answer. Too much for being a "community"