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Comment by bugsy | Hacker News Reader

I'm skeptical of such articles, but this one had a lot of good advice.

I so hate country selection popups that have 200 countries in them, and United States is near the bottom even though 95% of their customers are in the US, or perhaps they don't even ship outside the US. So many sites do that and it is infuriating.

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> I so hate country selection popups that have 200 countries in them, and United States is near the bottom

Another related problem for us Brits is that you sometimes end up doing a hunt up and down the list for one of "United Kingdom" -> "England" -> "Great Britain" -> "Britain" -> "British Isles" -> "The United Kingdom" etc. etc, whilst trying to remember all the different "synonyms".

Even that is unnecesary. Every shady "live chat with girls on Guadalajara" ad knows where I am located. Why is that the stupid registration form can't?

This kind of thing is the curse of using off the shelf e-commerce packages. You can easily avoid these kind of mistakes if you roll your own.

Then why does Skype do it for every out-going phone call? I have to select US from the drop down list every time I make a call even though my Skype number is US based.

Or just dial the full number, starting with a plus. For a Colorado number, for example, +1303..... and it'll correctly select the country and just work. (It'll detect the country as soon as it can. For country code 1, that means 4 digits, to see if it's US, Canada, or one of the many islands using the same area code (NANP).)

I remember reading in the Gnome Human Interface Guidelines (a document that defines consistency standards for gnome (linux gui) applications) that countries should always be alphabetically ordered as to not appear to favor any of them. Interestingly, it doesn't appear to be in the guidelines anymore though.

That makes a lot more sense in Gnome, a world-distributed open source project, than it does on many websites, where it's quite easy to figure out the source of the majority of your traffic.

My skype defaults to the country listed in my profile. Maybe yours does too?

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