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Comment by pixl97 | Hacker News Reader

>I have a lot of credit cards, and none of them say the name of the month on it, only the number. Why waste the space?

Use a lot (more then your sample size) of different credit cards and you'll see some only have 'FEB' or others 'February' and no numerical month at all. Others have the year as '14' or '2014'. It would have been better if the card issuers decided on a standard quite some time ago.

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That strengthens the case for having the user type in the value rather than using a drop-down menu. That way you can do the heavy lifting of normalizing the format rather than forcing the user to do it in their head.

This might seem really petty, but I'm always a little annoyed when I have to mentally convert the number on my credit card into a month. It always takes a moment to remember that 04 is March, or whatever. It's much easier just to type the value.

04 is April. Way to prove your point :)

Not just you, I've yet to have a card with a non numeric month. Instead of being friendly, putting month name is a usability loss. Are cards with names instead of numbers the majority in the US?

AFAIK no Visa or MasterCard uses names, so almost certainly not.

Error control and backend processing failures.

When the user types 'Juny' did he mean June or July.

The longer drop down option of '07 - JULY' shows all the combinations that I've seen printed on cards with the least potential of failure.

I do believe your reply has validated my point with the error it contains.

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