Awesome post! That's a problem space that I've been dedicating a lot of thought these days.
I've one of those long Iberian Peninsula names. Since it often overflows standard name form fields my US documents have 4 or 5 different compressed versions; I'm considering changing it to a shortened name plus surname format (like the one I use here) just to avoid noise.
One remedial solution for the "username re-use" case would be a shadow-lock for the old username, allowing only the original user to switch back to it if desired.
What's astounding is that the names don't even have to be foreign to overflow some of these systems.
"Christopher" is an exceedingly common name in the US, and yet it routinely gets truncated, usually to "Christophe" by systems, even when using the legal name may be warranted!
Awesome post! That's a problem space that I've been dedicating a lot of thought these days.
I've one of those long Iberian Peninsula names. Since it often overflows standard name form fields my US documents have 4 or 5 different compressed versions; I'm considering changing it to a shortened name plus surname format (like the one I use here) just to avoid noise.
One remedial solution for the "username re-use" case would be a shadow-lock for the old username, allowing only the original user to switch back to it if desired.
What's astounding is that the names don't even have to be foreign to overflow some of these systems.
"Christopher" is an exceedingly common name in the US, and yet it routinely gets truncated, usually to "Christophe" by systems, even when using the legal name may be warranted!
Exactly - while I do understand the pre-2000s rationale for smaller field sizes, this is one of the 'compromises' that boggles my mind.
Composite family names ('Tessier-Ashpool') suffer a similar fate, operators picking one part at random.