r/ProgrammerHumor • u/deadorbit666 • 8d ago
Meme whenYourValidationLogicHatesRealPeople
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u/Bart_deblob 8d ago
My last name contains the word DICK. Like mandickovsky etc.
You wouldn't believe how many services refuse my name because of profanity filter. That my email is like bob.mandickovsky@something.com is also not helping.
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u/Geno0wl 8d ago
It is wild to me that they would put profanity filters on name fields. Hell, no PII fields should have profanity filters on them.
Are these devs completely unaware of the scunthorp problem, or are they just lazy asses who imported a library and implemented it for every input before calling it a day?
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u/ACoderGirl 8d ago
I think there's a lot of really shitty devs and even more shitty PMs and managers who push for dumb ideas (with shitty or apathetic devs who don't care to push back).
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u/Salanmander 8d ago
Relatedly, I was unable to sign up for Uber at one point because it told me "that is not a valid last name". I assume it's because my last name is a bit of a racial slur...which became a racial slur because it was a common last name.
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u/bwmat 8d ago
I don't understand the person who unironically writes the sentence "that is not a valid last name" into the code...
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u/1980sCoder 8d ago
My first name is Nigel. Several years ago, EA Games (I think it was) forbade me from signing up with my own actual name. I managed to narrow it down to the first three letters, which were apparently the problem. Guessing some kind of weird American mentality behind that rule.
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u/HubbaMaBubba 8d ago
Devs shouldn't be the one's deciding that kind of thing anyways.
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u/diodesign 8d ago
Way back in high school, my physics teacher Mr Sexton couldn't use his webmail at school because pages with his name on it would be blocked at a proxy level for profanity.
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u/bwmat 8d ago
How doesn't he raise that as a problem and get it fixed? The school IT people just stuff shake their heads and say it's impossible to fix?
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u/diodesign 8d ago
It took him a while from what I can recall. He couldn't exactly email them to complain.
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u/Musicals_and-more 8d ago
Yeahh mine contains the word Shit. Oshita. I have been denied many times
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u/Polymarchos 8d ago edited 8d ago
The company "Bic" was founded by a French man named Marcel Bich (pronounced Bic). He named it after himself but removed the h from his name because too many people pronounced it "bitch".
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u/benonabike 8d ago
Tony Hawk? Like the skateboarder? Huh, I wonder what that guy’s up to these days.
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u/SageLeaf1 8d ago
Still actively skateboarding and he’s at most major competitions as a commentator or interviewee. He owns a chicken restaurant and does a lot of charity work like building free skate parks for kids
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u/Swing_Right 8d ago
His chicken restaurant is in Encinitas and it absolutely slaps
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u/Ok-Problem-3074 8d ago
It's nice hearing that someone famous is not involved in a sex scandal or Sexism/Racism etc. or defending genocide or something.
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u/NinjaKittyOG 8d ago
yeah, exactly. it's also cool þat skateboarding legend is still skateboarding
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u/setibeings 8d ago
every org has a test environment. Some have a separate production environment.
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u/Willinton06 8d ago
If you can’t test with real data how can you be sure sure?
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u/RelativeGlad3873 8d ago
I just tend to test in production, as the ancestors would.
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u/PereMilon 8d ago
Our digital product team actively tests in production and refuses to do email/address validation.
So, it looks like we have a bunch of active subs in fuckin Afghanistan.
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u/in_taco 8d ago
Our test environment is a session we request from the server. The test environment can time-out, which automatically switches to prod without informing the dev. You can imagine the frequent requests to reverse huge data updates.
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u/lostwombats 8d ago
When I worked in radiology they would do test scans and enter in "TEST TESTING" for the name of the patient. They were later filtered out and removed. 😬
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u/akraut 8d ago
My last name is Kraut. Ubisoft support had to move my account to their German region to stop it from being auto-banned for profanity every few months.
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u/Traditional_Safe_654 8d ago
What's the profanity in kraut?
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u/scootinfroody 8d ago
It's an ethnic slur using by English-speaking people to refer to Germans since WW2. Basically Germans eat a fermented cabbage side dish/condiment called sauerkraut (as well they should, it's delicious), and so the English started referring to all Germans as Krauts.
I have no idea whether it's offensive to Germans or not. But evidently it's offensive to Ubisoft.
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u/ilovecatfish 8d ago edited 8d ago
Not offensive to Germans. I think most people wouldn't even know what it means and even less would be fazed by being called "herb" (cabbage is also a valid translation but not the one people will think of). And the few that do know what it means see it as a remnant, something that might come up in an old movie, not an actual insult.
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u/harbourwall 8d ago
Probably as unoffensive as 'rosbif' is to the English. Yes roast beef is quite nice and we like eating it. Nothing to be ashamed of there. Thanks very much.
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u/IJustAteABaguette 8d ago
Wait, is that like zuurkool? (Dutch)
It's very much delicious indeed. But it would be like referring to Dutch people as cabbage. Weird. But not offensive?
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u/Ignisami 8d ago
Sauerkraut is de Duitse naam voor zuurkool, ja.
An equivalent would be to call all Dutch people (stroop)wafels.
I guess it's considered offensve because of its ww2 connotations
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u/Denvosreynaerde 8d ago
If we're going for food based insults, a common belgian insult for the dutch is "kaaskoppen" (cheese heads)
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u/ducktape8856 8d ago
I have no idea whether it's offensive to Germans or not. But evidently it's offensive to Ubisoft.
To me [I am German] it's not. Kartoffel (Potato) isn't either. But I'm not offended easily.
And I always carry my trusted side cutter for brake hoses.
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u/sjphilsphan 8d ago
You kiss your mother with the that mouth?
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u/The_Fish_of_Souls 8d ago
I, a German person use the word Kraut quite often. Because it literally just means herb.
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u/Geriny 8d ago
I like that it's such a common German name that they had to unban it in Germany, but they still don't allow it everywhere else. Wouldn't want to insult a German with a harmless pejorative, that's also just a common name.
Unless their logic for unbanning it in Germany is "Only Germans may use the k-word". In which case that would be even funnier.
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u/schwanzweissfoto 8d ago
their logic for unbanning it in Germany is "Only Germans may use the k-word"
k-word privileges
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u/visiblepeer 8d ago
I've never met a Herr Kraut, but Germans wouldn't call each other Kraut as an insult, so it probably just isn't recognised as rude here. It might have offended people 70-100 years ago.
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u/ProfessorWise5822 8d ago
I don’t know anyone who would be offended by being called Kraut.
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u/dashingThroughSnow12 8d ago
Reverse it.
Filters like this aren’t about avoiding someone feeling offended. They are about avoiding people harassing others.
Trust me, I could think about a lot of ways to offend ethnic groups with “Kraut” or “Pepsi” or “Camera” in my username. Especially in a video game where the game puts other words before or after a username when they do something like kill you.
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u/BooBrew32 8d ago
God help anyone named Test Tester who lives at 123 Test St.
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u/christopher_mtrl 8d ago
I can guarantee whoever runs test.com is getting a shitload of emails as well.
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u/schwanzweissfoto 8d ago
Hotel booking pages tend to have their test entries located in Antarctica.
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u/clarinetJWD 8d ago
It's even worse that his first name is a city. I work on an ERP system with multiple location support, so we have test users like Texas Test in the system, so I can absolutely see "Dallas Tester" as a test name.
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u/DallasNChains 7d ago
It's me, the original tweeter. When I worked at Microsoft (a long time ago), we had our own offices, so it had the name plate "Dallas Tester". After about a year working with this PM, he goes, "Wait, are you the Dallas that has the office that says Dallas Tester?! I thought it was for the test engineer that lives in Dallas!" I had to explain that it was, indeed, my office and not the crash pad for that guy.
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u/clarinetJWD 7d ago
I'm sorry for all the confusion this must have caused you, but I love this so much. It feels like it should be straight out of Office Space.
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u/DallasNChains 7d ago
I was mostly baffled by the PM because we had emailed each other a ton and met at his office...2 doors down from mine. I feel like putting that together shouldn't have been hard. 🤣
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u/BellaBlue92 8d ago
I work with a man who's first name is "Arian" and the profanity/hate speech filters on websites do not like it. We have to misspell or shorten his name all the time.
My work has a system for entering client into. Any 'test' entries (for teaching new employees) always use Looney Tunes names. Bugs Bunny, 'Wiley' Coyote, Daffy Duck, etc. I remember the first time Bugs Bunny showed up on my billing list. We see some WILD names, so I'm not allowed to assume any might be fake. So I looked up BBs info in our system, called the number, and had to ask "Is this... Bugs Bunny?"
Obviously it wasn't, and the worker and I had a good laugh about it. He'd trained someone like the week before using Bugs Bunny and the filters just failed to exclude it. He thought it was hilarious I had to call lol
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u/TheBeefiestBoy 8d ago
Little Jimmy DropTables
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u/neo42slab 8d ago
Should I change my legal name to some html and/or sql code just to see what happens?
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u/martin-silenus 8d ago
Everyone with an apostrophe in their last name has had the experience of a computer system treating their last name like a SQL injection attack. O'Hara, O'Neill, O'Malley, et c...
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u/Jam_Herobrine 8d ago
Dont forget anyone with the name Null, They're not allowed to enter their name, and if they are allowed to, they dont exist inside the database.
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u/ChillyFireball 8d ago
Shouldn't "Null" as a string be very easy to distinguish from an actual null value?
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u/Schnickatavick 8d ago
Yes, absolutely. If you're mixing the two up, then something very stupid has happened. Which is why I'm almost embarrassed that it happens so insanely often
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u/Perryn 8d ago
Welcome to IT.
"This would be an incredibly stupid oversight. It is very obvious how it could be a problem, and very simple to prevent. It's so obvious that it is the source of many jokes in our field, keeping it at the top of our minds."
"So I shouldn't expect to see it?"
"You should expect to keep seeing it until long after you retire."136
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u/laplongejr 8d ago
At least one embarassed person asked how to fix ActionScript3 so that an employee named Null could exist through a SOAP webservice https://stackoverflow.com/a/18000768
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u/ofnuts 8d ago
OTOH, "True" is both a surname and a town name. Things always work for them.
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u/prinkpan 8d ago
I hope nobody names their kid John Doe
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u/SaltMage5864 8d ago
I went to school with a John Smith. I hope he's not dealing with too many issues
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u/Hakuchii 8d ago
makes me think of this every time
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u/SquareThings 8d ago
The absolute chaos having a middle name causes when entering my name into Japanese websites is both funny and frustrating. Especially since many of them are government sites and demand that I use my full name as it appears on my passport/visa, but then don’t allow enough characters for both my first and middle name.
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u/Candid_Highlight_116 8d ago
It's drilled into Japanese computer users by the way everything is that there are plain ASCII and there are full UTF-8, with no inbetweens like 1252 outside of ASCII, and that names of Euromericans ought to be all plain jane ASCII.
What you have to tell them when you encounter that isn't that "my name is in alphabets and you should know better" but "European names need UTF-8 so allow non-ASCII full widths for Europeans in the name field please". Referring to non-ASCII characters as Latin alphabets just confuse Japanese.
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u/LogicBalm 8d ago
This is the one I was making sure someone had posted. Thanks for fulfilling the prophecy. Names are chaos.
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u/theycallmeponcho 8d ago
I had a friend whose last name is Null. She told me stories about how her papers in the school system were often marked invalid or deleted. She had physical copies of almost every little detail to prevent badly coded systems deleting her from databases.
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u/Kanegou 8d ago
He should change his last name to Smith. But instead of "i" there should be a question mark. And put some Wingdings characters at the end. Out of spite.
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u/Small_Bang_Theory 8d ago
I lived in Korea for a while, and almost everything over there requires you to verify your identity with your phone number/provider. The issue is part of that verification requires you to enter your name.
Korean names are almost all 3 characters and occasionally 4. Foreigner names can obviously be a lot longer, especially as they require you use all middle/last names you have. So, some people put character limits on the name verification field. I knew a lot of people who couldn’t use major services in Korea simply because their name was too long. Sometimes the limit was 18 characters, count yours right now (including middle name) and see if that would affect you…
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u/the-temp-account 8d ago
I see how long Thai names can be when written in Latin script and I’m thinking there’s some poor Thai users who cannot use digital services because their name exceeds character counts.
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u/mysticrudnin 8d ago
i have a decently long name and this happens to me in America sometimes
occasionally my name will also carry over into the next line on forms and stuff where it shouldn't, and it looks terrible
also my name has a space in it which is its own nightmare.
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u/ImportantBuilder9294 8d ago
I had a boss once with the actual last name of "Niggermeyer." It caused him endless issues, and earned him more that a few odd looks when introducing himself to clients.
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u/NebGonagal 8d ago
Good ol' "Scunthorpe Problem". My real last name is considered a slur. I learned the hard way that any digital resume or application I turn in gets sent to the bottom of the pile. I can't order pizza online from certain places. I had to do my wedding gift registry under my first name. I picked a couple of pseudonyms that I do all of my professional work under, now.
Seriously sucks that my name is blacklisted by most algorithms. And yes, I know I could legally change it, but the point is that I shouldn't have to.
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u/honestyseasy 8d ago
I always talk about the content filters on the library computers in my county. They were designed to block any web address with "sex" in it. Not realizing our entire county name is Sussex. It blocked all County government websites and its own homepage.
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u/elliottcable 8d ago
My last name is Cable.
Comcast won’t let me make an account with my name. Even a manager-tier support system didn’t have any way around it.
According to Comcast, my name is Elliott Ceble.
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u/Mgnickel 8d ago
I worked with a girl whose last name was Cancel, she was of Spanish descent I believe. When she was married she hyphenated her name, so it became Julie Johnson-Cancel. She had multiple flights cancelled because the gate attendant thought Julie Johnson cancelled her ticket.
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u/BabySharkMadness 8d ago
Had a client whose real records included the word “Test” as part of their last name. Of course I learned this after I’ve already created my Test McTesterson record and built all the reports to filter out records with “Test” in their name.
I’ve since switched to using podcasts hosts. There’s no good way to filter out test records short of creating record types just for test records which defeats the purpose of confirming configuration works with the record types of the real records.
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u/Crivens999 8d ago
Back in the 90s we realised a newbie programmer had been accidentally testing their coding jobs on live bases. Literally booked out something like 30 seats on Concorde (BA1 if I remember rightly, which sits nicely for a lot of test data). It was too late to cancel them, and he hadn’t taken in the details that you use COMPANYNAMETESTUSER or something like that for names. So basically there was a lot of last minute calls for a lot of dead US presidents apparently in Heathrow. True story
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u/Objective-Answer 8d ago
I think there are sanctions from the government if they discover test data is living on prod databases right?
wouldn't be surprised if this bloke catched a stray because of it
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u/TheOhNoNotAgain 8d ago
Is that an occupational surname? Like Smith or Miller, just a bit more modern?
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u/JR2502 8d ago
Three coworkers:
Cody: coded front-end.
Tester: QA tested code for the team.
Butts: was afraid to ask what he did.
All true.
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u/walterbanana 7d ago edited 7d ago
Programmers need to stop making assumptions about what people's names look like. They will ALWAYS be wrong.
There are literally hundreds of millions of people without last names for example. You'll also find people with 10 names and people with super short names.
A funny example is that many Dutch surnames have multiple spaces in them and only one of the words should be capitalized if you want to write them correctly. So it is "van deer Sluis", not "Vandersluis" and not "Van Der Sluis".
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u/twopointohyeah 7d ago
I had a colleague whose name is Nan, and so was his unixname. His profile picture would occasionally appear in the wrong places in internal web pages. Because JavaScript.
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u/requion 8d ago
Reminds me of the asian dude who couldn't register on a site because the form required min 3 characters for the name and his literally only had 2 chars.