Mars Buttfield-Addison 🛰

The other day I couldn’t buy an article from an academic publisher because my surname has a hyphen.

Today I can’t get into Dropbox because it has decided my email address—which I have had an account under for nearly a decade—is invalid.

I swear we have gotten worse at this stuff lately…? #UIFails

Sep 23, 2024 at 5:13amWeb
Show threadMars Buttfield-Addison 🛰Sep 23, 2024

Fun extra context: when we married, my husband came with two last names (Buttfield-Addison) from his two parents. I gave up mine because I wasn’t attached to it, had already changed it before when my parent married, and adding a second hyphenation would have been chaos. Mostly because of the two of us, he had written more books and therefore had more Google-ability to lose.

Everyone always asks me “two surnames… which one is yours?” and I have to bottle the internal rant I have about how the idea of double-barrelled surnames is nice and was an important step in the broader context of evolving the meaning of marriage / changing the perception of female “ownership” in hetero marriage / removing the male-female “roles” in other gendered marriages… but they don’t scale. The minute you have kids and they marry, they lose one or both. Many other cultures who have used double names have known this for a long time!

Show threadNorman WilsonSep 23, 2024
@TheMartianLife Given that it was your choice, made after some clear-headed thought about what you felt best, it seems to me the right answer is either `both names are mine' or `it's one name, not two, and it's mine.' Having grown up in an era when society frowned on allowing choice about such things, it seems to me just weird to try to argue with an actual choice made today.
Show threadMars Buttfield-Addison 🛰Sep 24, 2024

@oclsc I’m not resentful about the name I have, because I was not sentimental about mine. But many are, and expectations work against them. Society expects couples to marry, society expects them to end up with the same name, and even though society is becoming more okay with a solution that allows both parties to retain equal amounts of their original identity, the solution we have landed on doesn’t scale and will result in the original problem again a generation later.

All of these things are silly. I don’t think I’ll live to see marriage cease to be the “default” that is enforced by so many economic and social systems, but I do hope I see more creative mixing of identities when individuals become a union. And for systems—everything from search engines to academic journals, user accounts to fellowships—to become much better at identifying individuals by something other than names which may change over time. Which would benefit even more people than just married ones!

So yes, even though I personally find it funny, it’s still important to change.

Show threadJonSep 24, 2024
@TheMartianLife after helping my ex-SO legally recover her birth name following her divorce, my advice to everyone is to never, under any circumstances, no matter how much you like that other person, change your legal name - and if you change it back, the process is even worse and the errors and failures to correct will persist for years, if not the rest of your life.
Show threadAmo a Sam amatSep 23, 2024
@TheMartianLife yes, very much so. At my day job, I tried like a mad thing to say: "the only way to test email addresses is to send an email there".
Nothing would convince people.
The resulting webform is predictably terrible.
Show threadDusty Sep 23, 2024
@TheMartianLife I have to renew my code signing certificate, and in the last year they’ve updated the site to limit the First Names field to 16 characters - which is a problem when you have three first names.
Show threadTom HaywardSep 23, 2024
@TheMartianLife I remember when I couldn't register for a conference platform for a similar reason.
After about an hour of trying, I realised that it baulked at the capital letter after then hyphen. Probably someone had said "valid names have exactly one capital" or something silly. 😞
Show threadMorten Juhl-JohansenSep 23, 2024
@TheMartianLife Speaking as @ mjj because I couldn't register as @ mj-j:
I concur
Show threadJamesTDGSep 23, 2024
@TheMartianLife It is such an absurd thing to cock-block the hyphen
Show threadT.J. CrowderSep 23, 2024

@TheMartianLife Names, email addresses, physical addresses, telephone numbers... People are constantly getting rules for these wrong by applying their limited experience as though it were universal. Drives me NUTS.

You're not alone: https://hachyderm.io/@[email protected]ocial/113185097559067180

Also: https://www.kalzumeus.com/2010/06/17/falsehoods-programmers-believe-about-names/

Preston von Gabbleduck (@[email protected])

Dear {everyone who writes software that has logins or full-name usernames} Please hire some people with diverse names. Stupid name rules like no spaces, no special characters, no lower-case starts to words in a name – let alone presence of so-called "conventional" name elements (surname, forename, middle names, etc.) need to be dumped in a ditch forever. #UX

Aus.Social
Show threadNorman WilsonSep 23, 2024
@tjcrowdertech @TheMartianLife I've heard of web forms that rejected e-mail addresses because they included a subdomain, or because they were longer than 20 characters, or other such what-world-do-they-live-in issues. Not for a while, though. At least they've got past the babe-in-arms level; now to get them past toddler.
Show thread2¢Sep 23, 2024
@TheMartianLife imagine if your name had a "@" character in it.
Show threadApril’s FoolSep 23, 2024
@TheMartianLife yea, my last name has an apostrophe, but only sometimes it seems. 🥴
Show threadJonSep 24, 2024
@TheMartianLife yes we have. Try running your own mail server these days (and getting major servers to accept mail sent from it), or running OSS tools like fetchmail which expect to operate under standard protocols that e.g. Google and Microsoft no longer support.
Show threadYour Name Is Invalid!Nov 18, 2024

@TheMartianLife
Names of people cannot be invalid.

#UIFails