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Comment by cyberferret | Hacker News Reader

I am amazed that a lot of systems don't allow changing of information once entered. I signed up with a new ISP a couple of years ago - one of the biggest ISPs in Australia, and during the phone conversation to set up my plan, the operator heard my first name wrong, substituting a 'v' with a 'b'. I didn't realise during the call (because, well, it IS hard to pick up that nuance audibly) until they sent me my sign on links which of course had the typo in my username. Billing information is also all wrong.

When I told them about it, their response was pretty much "Oh, too bad - once that username is created, it is there for life. You will have to shut down that account and create a new one", meaning I lose all the benefits I got from the promotional transfer.

So I just put up with a wrong first name whenever I sign on or ask for support from them. I still think it is strange that some second or third level support engineer can't just change that info in the database for me, after the proper authentication. I can't believe that something so easy to create over the phone can be so hard to change over the phone.

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If this is the type of error you want to minimize, NATO phonetic alphabet [1] is worth learning. (Amateur radio is a good place to practice, though I'll admit I'm a bit rusty.)

I actually kinda enjoy these minor discrepancies, because it exposes who has sold my customer data and to whom -- though I've never gone as far as giving anyone intentionally incorrect data with this purpose in mind. I remember my parents also being amused with these copied mistakes, and with greater frequency. Seems plausible that the error rate goes down when most of my utilities/accounts were self-created online instead of typed in from a handwritten form or during an onboarding phonecall.

[1]: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/NATO_phonetic_alphabet

Ironically (being a former pilot), I DID use radio phonetics when spelling out my name - I just wish ALL call centre staff used the same baseline too.. :)

Me: That's ABCD as in Alpha, Bravo, Charlie, Delta. Them: So, that's Alpha, Burger, er, Charles, Diamond??

That's one of my pet peeves... There's an official phonetic letter system, why don't they train these people in call centers to use them?

My last job used radios for site communication, and everyone had to use the NATO phonetics, and was provided with a cheat sheet for learning. You'd think that would be something they could tape up in every cube in a call center...

Or better yet, upgrade our phone system to bleeding-edge high-fidelity CD quality with 44.1khz and 16 bits.

It's not a natural law that phone audio quality has to suck.

Even with a phonetic alphabet, you can still run into issues. Some people are just surprised when they hear it. "P for Papa" / "was that P as in Patrick?" Sigh... I'm seriously considering changing my surname to something that's trivial to understand in English.

Man, my surname is a basic color and people still get it wrong sometimes.

Well, #00ff00 could be difficult to dictate over the phone... :-)

Sorry, Gray with an "a" or Grey with an "e"?

(Teachers knew in high school for three or four years never quite figured out whether my surname was the Danish or the German variation of a common patronymic. I feel your pain.)

Try living with almand instead of almond.

My surname is Fox.

Its very hard for CS agents to spell correctly.

Hello Mr. Focks.

I once gave a phone number over the phone using Nine-er for 9. Operator thought I said "Nine Oh" (or 90).

"B for bacon and eggies. E for the egg in bacon and eggies. A..."

I once used NATO phonetics over the phone with a Blizzard representative, there's a Z in my name, so they guy called me Mr. Zulu since then.

My friend was trying to get an account with his ISP to his apartment. The ISP got data from the landlord, my friend noticed that he was in fact getting internet for another apartment completely.

He first told them to cancel the deal, then tried again, same wrong apartment number registered, he called the ISP and the response was, "yes we know it's the wrong one, but we've mapped that apartment to your apartment on our side, so all is good."

How would it play out legally if I sign a contract where delivery is to be made to X but I want it to Y, but they tell me to sign it anyways because they can fix it in their end. I mean, what I signed would not be what I wanted, how so I prove this if my wish is not fulfilled?

>lose all the benefits from promotional transfer

Were you not able to direct the person on the phone to recreate the account for you, and to include all benefits, and then some for the inconvenience?

I've always gotten what I wanted from US ISPs. Say what you want about their evil business practices, but it sure is easy to get whatever weird shit you're asking for with simple "ok, you can't give me this? Please escalate to your manager / please transfer me to retention."

I am curious your life experience that makes you assume fixing the errors is doable with a phone operator. I'm from California, and my assumption is no, the person on the phone wouldn't be able to recreate the account with benefits/promotion.

In my experience with phone staff in any large org, once an error is committed, it's generally a one-way street. Attempts to get the person to fix things lead to worse and worse problems, more damage, more problems.

My experience with T-Mobile seems typical: simply wanted to take monthly plans of myself and wife (both with TMbl) and combine into a single family plan. By the time the ordeal was done, I'd forfeit the remainder of my month's payment into the plan, had no functional phone, was being bounced between two different departments neither of whom could fix it, and both of whom insisted the other was the one to fix it.

In the end I just let the money go and moved my phone number onto a competitor. I have no faith the competitor will fare better if some error is made.

Anecdotally, I've had bad experiences with T-Mobile (similar issues with customer service reps messing up a plan transfer, and being unable to fix it), but I've found Verizon reps to be more able/willing to fix things.

Funny story:

My ISP actually closed my contract earlier this year. Out of the blue, I got a phone call from someone about "my cancellation". After some puzzled minutes the operator figured out that someone else with the same name cancelled their account but didn't state a customer ID or his address, so they went on to cancel mine. The operator told me he'd correct this, but a month later my internet access went down all the same.

After some back and forth to get it back up, the next supporter I had on the line said that they actually tried to cancel the cancellation, "but it was already too late for that" and the system didn't let them. That was surely one of the bigger WTF moments I had with support so far.

If the typo was in the name and you cancel because of it, then you should just tell them this isn't your name and thus the contract is invalid. If they claim it is, then tell them if that's the case, why do you refuse to correct an obvious error? And until they do, the contract is null and void.

> In the end I just let the money go

So, I've had pretty much your exact experience with T-Mobile, but I never did this. I just called and called and called. I'd stay on hold while I lifted or was driving around, it was no skin off my bones. When I had a person, I'd always repeat "this is exactly I want in no uncertain terms. Do you understand? Can you get me this? No? Please transfer me to your supervisor / retention." For some reason, they'd always transfer me up. I've almost never heard "no" to a transfer request. I've never not gotten what I wanted.

So maybe I'm just waaaaay more annoyingly persistent? :P I probably have notes raging at my dickishness on every account I hold.

That reminds me of American Express. My firstname is Christopher, but it seems parts of their system have a very short length limit. So when they send letters and emails, they call me "Christophe". It is spelled correctly on my card, though

A high school classmate's name was Joseph Longname, which the attendance system displayed as "LONGNAME, Jose".

I'm also a Christopher. For the longest time, in the upper right corner of Amazon.com, there was a sign-out link that said, "Not Christ...?"

I've seen that too, "Welcome Christ..."

Heh, mine has always just been my first initial. "Welcome, R!". Also when I buy Kindle ebooks the default option is "Send to R's Kindle".

I have no idea where this info is stored as the details on my billing / shipping addresses have my correct (full) name.

Windows had this length limit all the up to and including Win8, my work login which included a 3 letter domain and backslash was too long for Windows, so they cut the last 3 letters of my name off so that I could be logged in. It's made logging in to to some work services difficult, I'm not always sure they are asking for full ID like email address, or the truncated version.

10 isn't much better if you're using a Microsoft account. My email follows the format "fmlastname@gmail.com" (and is coincidentally the exact same character count). My user directory gets shortened to "fmlas".

I also have a truncated first name thanks to Virgin Media in the UK. Mind you, the same bozos also limit password length to 8 or 10 characters, so they are generally hopeless.

I think that for letters it is to avoid names that overflow name tags

So it's better for them to send a mail to LongName LastName than to LongNameSomethingHere where the last name fell outside of the tag

And as your card shows, the full name is on the DB

Except you would expect that it's basic design to account for both very short names ("Li Pho") and reasonably long names ("Christopher Tannenbaum-Greenspan").

If your name tags don't work with slightly longer names, your name tags are broken, not the names.

OTOH these days I'm happy when receiving mail from the US if the address wasn't mutilated by converting Unicode to ASCII or using HTML escapes. Especially when ordering things to my company address, which has an ampersand in the company name and an umlaut in the city.

Your name tags are a function of the space allocated for the address on a letter (which is printed in bulk)

They're doing exactly what you mentioned in the first line, so big names are identifiable on letters with size limits for the address

Might be as simple as some genius designed database using usernames instead of ids for relations in tables.

Trust me - I seen things like this before (with huge companies where dev soft costed millions of USD). Probably same story here.

Or worse, someone designed the database correctly, but then added a (hidden to the user) unique identifier that's normalized in some way to make it short, unique, and limited on allowed characters.

Often /that/ doesn't get updated when they update the username, leading to mass confusing since external tooling will use that as the subject identifier instead of actually being given a proper internal identifier. (Offhand I can't recall if any particular standard happens to require that such an identifier start with a letter; at least one probably does.)

And this is why you should always use synthetic keys.

> I am amazed that a lot of systems don't allow changing of information once entered.

For systems where cell-level change logging on the order of years is a requirement, this doesn't surprise me. Many providers would rather prohibit edits rather than risk having to greatly expand logging requirements.

> Oh, too bad - once that username is created, it is there for life.

So what happens if you change your name, e.g. because of marriage?

Twitch.

I had a similar experience with an Australian ISP, although not with a typo.

When I moved house I had to make up a new username/email. They couldn't just change my address, they had to create a whole new account.

I'm looking at you, TPG. Truth be told, they have been a fine ISP, other than that WTF.

Similarly, my job lets me claim a part of the monthly internet bill as a work-from-home expense, but my ISP cost me 6 months expenses because they couldn't transfer the account to my name from my SO's. Same last name, same address. To start a new account they wanted a sign up fee equal to about 3 months of said expenses. Employer would not accept a copy of the bill in my SO's name (same surname, same address) citing tax fraud, which surely would have been our own breach of law if we both had been making the same claim on the same bill.

Bureaucracy won again. Until we got a different operator at the ISP who worked out that they could add my name as if the account was landlord & renter scenario, so there could be an owner and another who was responsible for payment.

Same thing for Hacker News - you can't change your username and keep your karma. I guess the designers just don't design for that. https://www.quora.com/Why-cant-I-change-my-username-on-Hacke...

I wouldn't want an HN user to be able to ditch her reputation while keeping her karma.

Perhaps not in that case, but regardless, this is the kind of thing should be designed in deliberately as a feature (with an option to bypass it under special circumstances), rather than some accidental/arbitrary technical limitation just because the dev team didn't bother to implement the ability to update the field for whatever reason.

Given your profile shows all your comments and submissions (and would likely still show them if only the name was changed), I'm not sure what the big deal is here.

You learn to recognize the names of active users that post in threads you're interested in. I shouldn't be able to ditch that recognition but keep my karma, and you shouldn't have to look through my history to see if I'm someone you previously recognized.

Eh, maybe I don't see it. I mean, I use a lot of internet forums running scripts like XenForo and IPB, and those let you change your 'display name' whenever the hell you like. Yet I still recognise everyone perfectly fine. There are people on my forums that change their display name, avatar and signature on a weekly basis. I still recognise them just fine.

Same works on Discord too. There you can change your name whenever the hell you feel like it. Again, doesn't stop most people recognising you.

The difference is that changing your username creates a completely new identity. It's not just correcting a typo.

The point is that it doesn't need to be that way. Why can't username be an editable field?

Because it creates a new identity. The only way anyone on HN can recognize you is your username. Changing it at will would allow anyone to shed their identity on HN at any time while keeping the karma and account privileges they've accumulated.

Perhaps that is something that's worth allowing, and iirc dang et al have made some vague statements that they may be interested in allowing that at some point, but the ramifications would be substantial. This isn't something that should be taken lightly, nor should it be expected/implicit that a social site will accommodate new identities on-demand.

> Because it creates a new identity.

And?

My anonymous (to everyone but the NSA) username will be a different anonymous username. The karma/privileges are entirely dependent on the quality of my posts, not some inherent value of the username. Also the posts that generated that karma would still be there under the new username.

I'm not too concerned either way , but I don't see why that would be a big deal.

Again, identity. You're not anonymous here, you're pseudonymous. Believe it or not, but I do actually recognize a lot of people here by their HN usernames, and I would mind if those were to randomly change all the time.

Anyway, I suspect that if you e-mail HN mods, they could be able to correct your username in no time. But making it any easier than that would, IMO, be harmful to community.

> but I don't see why that would be a big deal.

Yes, you don't. But forum managers have been aware of the issue for years

It's a feature that's very easily abused.

What is the abuse? Changing your meaningless identifier?

Despite your explanation, I still don't see any actual damage. I made up the identifier in the first place. Why should anyone care if I change it? All my posts will remain my posts.

The only thing is that maybe some people who remember my posts with the old username won't recognize the new name as the same poster, which I don't see as a significant issue. Is that a problem for forum managers? I would have thought they would have problems with people creating multiple new accounts and spamming, not changing the username of existing accounts.

Please explain, I'm honestly curious. Maybe I'm missing something?

> who remember my posts with the old username won't recognize the new name as the same poster, which I don't see as a significant issue. Is that a problem for forum managers?

Yes, because people will abuse it. If you keep track of violations (especially in moderated forums) it's important to know who did what. And while your primary key on the DB might still be the same, people don't know it, they know your nickname.

Some people would change it every time they comment just for the sake of it

New account creations have some kind of gatekeeping/email verification so it's not as efficient, and admins have ways of checking if this was done with the purpose of evading a ban for example

But if you want to change it because you made a typo or for a similar reason admins usually let you do it (they have to change it for you though)

That can be addressed within the UI. E.g. display the old name next to the new name for a few weeks. After that, just leave a symbol indicating that this username has a change history, which could be presented on click or hover.

HN encourages people to pick their real names as usernames (or a variant of such) for 'real identities', but ignores the reality that people change their names when they get married. Is getting married a completely new identity? Now the username doesn't actually identify the poster by the name people might recognize, if they gained their rep after getting married.

I don't know their policy, but I would guess that if someone has a reasonable explanation like this (or some other small change that doesn't materially affect the ability of readers to recognize the user), the HN team will try to be accommodating. They have always been responsive and gracious to me on the handful of occasions that I've contacted them, although I'm sure my questions were annoying.

I've asked before, they said no.

My guess: the underlying database uses usernames as a primary key and they don't want to update all the comments and submissions just to make a specific user happy. Especially because doing it once would set a precedent for others.

I doubt they'd use the username as the primary key, but either way, I agree the precedent is the biggest concern. They'd get inundated with name change requests if they started making exceptions for people.

HN encourages people to pick their real names as usernames

From what I've observed, HN encourages people to use consistent identities, not necessarily real names. 'dang has mentioned a number of times that pseudonymity is fine.

Workaround: Don't change your name when you get married. Less work, it makes genealogy research for your descendants easier. And the only downside is people guess the wrong name because of all the patriarchy.

There are always exceptions. I have a friend who had a bad history with her family, so she really wanted to take her husband's name. But I still believe that keeping your pre-married name is usually the best choice if you don't want your identity to be lost or subsumed.

That's incredibly dismissive of couples who decide to pick a shared family name. There are more downsides than people guessing wrong, but that's beside the point. You're basically arguing that the only reason people do it is patriarchy and giving up your native name is giving up your identity as if it were a form of oppression.

Eh, people choose oppression for themselves all the time. We have a right to determine our own identity, for sure. It's just unfortunate that people just happen to make the choice that supports patriarchy the most often, that you wonder what forces are really in play.

A brand new HN account is worthless, so typos don't matter because you can make a new account and redo your single post.

Changing a name that was correct is a totally different problem from a typo at ingest.

Immutability of names may be a perceived benefit and a feature, vs. simply poor UX.

Regulatory, perhaps?

Regulatory is a process, so if there's a process... we can correct name on a typo on our passport, why not in this case? Either the regulatory is really really stupid (we never thought of it!), or the company bought a bad system.

Amazing that in the age of git and Merkle trees it is still hard to change something plus keeping an immutable history of the changes for documentation/accountability purposes. This should be a basic requirement for any sane system nowadays.

It is how most databases, filesystems and distributed systems work, so we know how to build those things, we don't even need merkle trees.

And despite the fact that many real world problems can be better modeled with an append only log and a derived state, somehow 99% of software systems opt to store the derived state only.

Hard to imagine any situation whatever where someone's name would change so that definitely makes a lot of sense.

Marriage.

Yeah, that's what I was getting at.

Friendly suggestion: The italics didn’t help the sarcasm come across any easier.

So what do you suggest?

A trailing /s is the convention. Failing that, perhaps less subtlety? Text is poor at conveying tone.

Why don't I put a flashing red sign that says I am joking while I'm at it?

It's up to you; you're the one controlling the chances people will get the joke in your comment :P.

At this point I'm resigned to people taking even the most improbable interpretation of whatever I say if it gives them an opportunity to call me an idiot.

Much to my occasional regret, the principle of charity is far more often invoked here than adhered to.

Unfortunately, HN doesn't support blink tags.

Where can I make a feature request?

I thought it was pretty obvious and the italics made it more so.

People can be very wrong on the internet so it's hard to tell sometimes.

Also, Poe's Law. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Poe%27s_law

Don't use sarcasm on the internet (or at least not on HN), it usually ends with a bunch of responses which didn't pick up on the fact that it was sarcasm which lowers the quality of the conversation. Remember also that many HN readers are not native english speakers and are unlikely to pick up on the true meaning of a comment if you're not really clear. Even suffixes like /s are not clear IMHO (at least, I didn't know what it meant until I saw the other comment here suggesting it and I AM a native english speaker).

Jokes and such are frowned upon on HN and many people probably see sarcasm the same way, so you risk getting downvoted too.

In order to avoid adding noise (in the form of responses from people who didn't realise you weren't serious), I would suggest to refrain from sarcastic comments.

I will definitely cease using a useful rhetorical device in case a handful of people might misunderstand me.

That may be right in your culture but it is not universally true. For example in Taiwan the law allow one to change name twice[1]. I met someone whose mother was actively searching for a more lucky name before graduation (thus reducing expected paperwork).

In France too where there is some provisions to change its name. Someone in my town who was running a business did it. His family name was Hittler, which has you guess was quite heavy to handle, and change it for Hittier.

[1] http://www.taipeitimes.com/News/taiwan/archives/2010/05/30/2...

It's actually not right in my culture at all; it's blindingly obviously wrong.

Of course there are a huge number of reasons why you would want to have the ability. I don't agree with the system requirements, I was trying to figure out why it may be that way.

What are you talking about?

Women usually take the surname of their husbands in western countries.

Edit: oh, sorry I thought you were being serious.

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