Do Online Forms reject your name?

Thing is, Fake is not a prank name. As she shares on her blog,

"Fake" is my real name. It was anglicized from the German, "Feick" in the 1500s. Fake acquired its present meaning only in the 19th century, afaik. I still maintain my grandfather had the worst of all possible names: Leverne Mucklow Fake. He was a lawyer who once met in court another lawyer named Abel Crook. He also told tall tales so who knows if this is actually true.

Facebook is not the only place that has rejected Ms. Fake. Turns out Northwest Airlines also deletes her tickets.

For the record, Ms. Fake is an entrepreneur and co-founder of Flickr. When she posted her online rejection, she got a host of responses from others whose names do not pass the specifications of online forms.

That is really bad. I couldn't get an Orkut account because my name contained "profanity". If they only knew what Orkut means in Dutch.... And Flickr for that matter ;-) Ianus Keller |

September 29, 2006 03:02 AM Hey Mark Zuckerberg is a genius and he went to Harvard, and he's worth, what, $300 billion at least I've heard. If he says your name is illegitimate then it must be. Who are we to disagree with him. Jason Liebe |

October 2, 2006 08:50 PM One of my University friends had to carry his passport every where. His name - Julius Caesar! Owen | October 12, 2006 11:16 AM

The issue of online forms rejecting people simply because their name didn't meet the specifications and requirements of a software program made the news recently when a San Francisco man shared his frustration with the local ABC affiliate that Best Buy's Reward Program Form wouldn't accept his two letter name.

Charles Yu: "I feel I'm being singled out just because of my last name and because of that I would have to do something different than other people who could just do it online so I thought that was unfair." When he called Best Buy one customer service agent even suggested he change his name Charles Yu: "I said well, I think that is a little ridiculous - I don't want to change my last name just to sign up for this."

According to the report, BestBuy is "fixing" its form (no timeline given) and have sent Mr. Yu a gift card. While consumers may feel sympathy for the Mr. Yu's, Ms. Fake's, and Julius Caesar's in the world, the folks who discussed this on Reddit  have a different take on the situation.

Just another lame large-company-IT-department. Did they ever test their software? permalink jvance 3 points 17 days ago

Sure they did. They tested it thoroughly and it matched the requirements. Three letter last names were accepted, and two letter last names were rejected. You can see the requirement on Section 4.3.2.7 of the requirements document, which is linked to item 4-35 in the RTM which of course is linked to Scenario 4-35 in the User Acceptance Test. What's the problem?

lemmikins 2 points 17 days ago Or just put a space in: "Y u" -- this is valid as it's not leading or trailing whitespace. It will probably even match credit card lookups as names are usually stripped of all punctuation, so e.g. Mac Manus -> MACMANUS, O'Brien -> OBRIEN, De Toqueville -> DETOQUEVILLE, Baxter-Birney -> BAXTERBIRNEY, etc.

I suspect the Best Buy agent suggested something like this, and that's when Yu started complaining that wanted him to change is last name. If I have a name that's 12392 characters long, do I get to complain each time I must shorten it for a web form?

Mr Yu is a sufferer of victimism. No one was singling him out. No one decided 'lets screw those f*'ers with 2 letter last names'. It was a dumb mistake by the programmers who made a bad assumption. The suggestion to change his last name probably was more like 'enter something with three letters' as a workaround.

Is this a case of right vs. right? Should people expect to enter their given name on an online form even when that name is nonconventional or may meet the criteria of spam and a crank entry?

Shouldn't companies anticipate that people are offended when a computer says their name in not valid?

On the other hand, don't companies have a right to create some requirements or specifications to prevent abuse?

Could the answer simply be to have a real person available in the event a person is having problems entering their name? And, couldn't companies empower those customer service types to override the software to allow exceptional names to be entered on the form? How hard would that be?

This is cross-posted at Blogher

Image Credit: I used Flickr to resize the original graphic used in Ms.Fake's post.