20 years of online shopping and a whole industry excited to collect data and autofill and address checking functions STILL mess up apartments.
The system is set up to work well with houses, but there is no consensus on if "apartment/suite" should be a separate field or not... and it's also still often rendered wrong, and makes bad suggestions such as "correcting"
123ABC to 123Abc
Granted when I worked in database design this was my "thing" so I'm hypercritical ... but still.
I get personally offended because I suspect that it's some kind of American suburban-centric mentality that makes apartments an afterthought.
The correct answer is that "apartment suite" should be a separate field NOT tacked on to the street address, but in most renderings it should be on the same line with a comma.
And you need to deftly separate this information if the user tries to enter it in the address line.
ANYWAY.
Yeah that's very typical. There are like 100 units in our building but next door it's about 300.
dude there's like 20k units added every year. i guess it must be fun to be so arrogantly wrong (and prove her point) tho
Having a single house address in NYC means one of few things things:
1. You live in deep Brooklyn, Queens, SI or maybe the Bronx. These are working class and middle class neighborhoods and the opposite of mansions.
2. You are one of like 37 people who have one of the few intact brownstones, and probably gave your house a damn name for some reason "The Glopper House" it's as expensive as a mansion but not as big. You brag about your 4' by 8' backyard.
3. You are the Mayor.
Given that I brag about our roof garden all the time I can't be too hard on the people who brag about those tiny dark little yards where you can't even grown corn. (rooftop garden>tiny yard)
@futurebird I haven't had this problem in the past 2 years, but the occasional site that does not offer DC as a state. Or insist that the state is “Washington DC”. Nope, Washington is the city, DC is the state. I remember once contacting support and they said to just enter Washington as the state.
Now you have me on a roll. How about asking for zip code first so city and state can be automated. I realize that sometimes the city will be wrong but allow the person to fix it.
I have seen sites that ask for zip first! It's very convenient. Unfortunately, I can't recall any that allow the city to be overridden (not that I ever need to), although since I put in the street address already, maybe they can always figure it out (or maybe they just think they can).
Plu ca change...
One of my first programming tasks was in 1985 - coding mailing list sw for a non-profit. Asking for zip/postal code first, then populating unique fields automatically, plus structured+validated fields per the USPS - it wasn't rocket science, but 99.99% of systems still got it wrong.
Add in the failure of every single system to adequately deal with multiple recipients at the same address, and it was already clear computers were shaping up to be a bad idea.
@lolcat @futurebird Bringing to mind Douglas Adams on the subject of coming out of the trees...
“Many were increasingly of the opinion that they’d all made a big mistake in coming down from the trees in the first place. And some said that even the trees had been a bad move, and that no one should ever have left the oceans.”
...and at least half of American adults are apparently deeply skeptical of the whole trees/oceans story - leading the rest of us to question even the move to multicellularism.
And yet that may just replace machine-encoded biases with human-habit biases:
https://hcommons.social/@beadsland/114829262094497808
To be clear, in Usia, building numbers appear at the beginning of the line, where unit numbers appear at the end. In Germany, building number appears at the end of the line.
So now you, as a German shipper, prepare a routing label for a Usian address that ends with a unit number. You're given a freeform multi-line text field, but the courier wants specific fields. What ends up in the building number field depends on how cognizant you are of the difference between German and Usian addressing practices.
@[email protected] @[email protected] @[email protected] Once had something shipped to me from Germany that got caught in a USPS mail loop because the shipper was confused by my unit number, and used it for the building number on the routing label, insisting all the while that they had reproduced my address exactly as given to them.
And yet we inhabit a willful world.
Per OP, best to design systems that account for that.
If anyone asked me how addresses should be written it go a little like this:
Earth, USA, Some City, 12345
1234 Some Street, Apartment Six
Floor Five, Department of Things
Person Name
But... noooooo
Yes you have to write "Earth" every time. It's for perspective.
Local Group, Milky Way, Sol System
Earth...
myrmepropagandist
Tom Magnanimous
🛠️☘️🍯 bug 🍄🧣⚙️
Chris L
Paul Chernoff
TobyBartels
Martin Piper (he/him) 💙💛🌻💉
RealGene ☣️
lolcat
Who by avalanche who by powder
Catherine is not complacent
Stumpy The Mutt
Jernej Simončič �
Roger BW 😷
sport of sacred spherical cows
Landa 
Speed demon 🇪🇺 🇳🇴🇺🇦🇵🇸
apophis