Auto fill likes to put a space after the name that often will make these forms freak out.
Not always. My mortgage company uses a software where it treats the password as invalid if it’s autofilled. I have to copy and paste the password into the box to remove the error.
Why people and companies need to make things purposefully difficult is beyond me. This shit is decades old and solved. Yet, they’re still constantly broken.
What usually works is adding a character at the end of the autofilled password and then removing it
My old bank would not allow pasted passwords, nor autofill. For a while PayPal was the same way.
Many password managers have a function where they can fill the password by sending key presses for troublesome sites like that.
https://github.com/marcos10pc/dont-f--with-paste-bookmark
Don't fuck with paste - a bookmarklet for those occasions.
Security theater.
"Look, boss, i made thing more secure!"
Spaces are valid within names.
Are they valid after names? I mean I suppose they could be, but how could you ever, and I mean ever, write out the name in that case?
No but the software should just remove excess whitespace instead of complaining
thing.trim()
No it shouldn't. Text field entry should have two properties: (1) accept any UTF-8 string, (2) do not modify that string.
If you want to make sure people don't make mistakes, take all your current validation code and turn it into a huge red warning that pops up if you try to continue with an "incorrect" field, asking you to double-check before proceeding. In the OP case it would be "You have entered an uncommon name", in case of extra whitespace it would be "There is whitespace after the name". Let the person themselves edit the field, don't change the text automatically at all.
If those fields are used for anything other than interacting with the person entering them, validate during submission. In this case, charge a $1 HOLD on the credit card using the info provided.
Anything other than that will lead to someone somewhere having an issue like the OP.
No, you should definitely sanitize the names if you are going to display them anywhere. You don't need JS to execute just because it's in someone's name, and that would also cause it to display incorrectly as the JS portion would not be shown. Getting rid of excess whitespace is fine aswell as it does not change the name
That's just awful security practices. You must not replace proper code/data separation with user input sanitization. If you are just pulling names from a database and inserting them into your DOM directly you're doing things majorly wrong and half your codebase probably needs rewriting from scratch.
If your stack does not support code/data separation, you should escape at the point of use/point of interface with other software, not at the point of user data entry.
You should not "sanitize" something as personal as a name. It is up to the individual to identify themselves as they see fit, whether it is some weird legal name or just how they want to present. For every "rule" about names you can think of, there will be an exception somewhere.
In fact, even splitting up the name field into "first name" and "last name" is already wrong. It should just be "name". If you need there to be a separate "first name" and "last name" for some reason (e.g. an external system which requires it), allow leaving either one as empty. Bonus points if you have independent "legal name" and "how would you like to be called" fields.
Getting rid of excess whitespace is fine aswell as it does not change the name
As a responsible developer you must not assume this. Especially if your software interacts with other systems. You never know what dumb shit some other system has got up to, maybe a clerk somewhere accidentally entered someone's name with a space and that person desperately needs to use your software while they're getting things fixed.
As an immigrant, I have been personally strongly inconvenienced by user input validation very often. For example, a tax agency system (which has my passport number recorded with a space) rejected automatic declarations from my bank (where the system did not allow spaces in the passport number) so I had to fill my tax declarations manually for a while. Or my bank rejecting bills from the water utility because the utility's system required entering two surnames, and I only have one, so they just put it in there twice. The amount of services which reject my pretty normal-looking self-hosted email address with "enter a valid email address" (presumably it must end in @gmail.com or @outlook.com) is staggering. This kind of bullshit is widespread and it needs to stop. You as a developer don't know better than the person entering the data about themselves.
100% this.
So many places do these things wrong and just make wild assumptions based on their limited PoV.
I just spent a month adding international phone, name, and postal code support to a legacy app at my job.
They weren’t even consistent with their enforcement inside of the app.
Don’t add validation for anything unless you understand 100% of the cases. You should use premade libraries or tools in most cases because you will do it incorrectly.
The rules around passwords are equally as dumb
Who are you to judge that my name isn't valid? I can be " Bart 2" if I want to be.
what if my name has a space at the end though?
Or this https://youtu.be/nq-dchJPXGA
Also, happy cake day!
Couldn't you just make it so the text box doesn't accept spaces to prevent that? Why allow a character to be input that makes the field invalid?
Yeah, that's also a bad idea, there's plenty of (mostly none-western) forenames that contain spaces, and plenty of surnames that contain spaces all over the world (Charles de Gaul, Guy Manuel de Hommen-baron)
All they really need to do is to onSubmit do a .trim() to the name
Because even if a space at the end of the name should be considered invalid, people can have names with spaces inside.
This is true. I know someone with a legal first name that's two words. He's a kid I work with. His parents made a point that his name isn't one or the other, it's both, and we are to address him as such.
To my understanding (as a non-tech person who consumes tech-related media), name fields are commonly culturally biased. Usually it impacts last names, which can vary in size and layout across the world, sometimes including hyphens (which some systems don't like either.) Super short or long names also run into problems. Not everyone has one first name, one middle name, and one last name, but a lot of systems aren't designed to handle that kind of variation.
Nah, backend is hard, and they only know JS.
As a primarily backend engineer, I think the opposite here. The backend makes sense, JS is just a nightmare.
Of course you can. But whoever developed the form didn't care about their craft.
Japan has gotten a lot better but you still run into shit for this sometimes. First and middle names often have to be input without a space, so you end up with Johnwendell Anderson. And sometimes forms require names to be input with the Japanese phonetic alphabet (which lacks a lot of letters in English), and then if it doesn't match some document you need to verify an online input there can be trouble. So Jeeves would become Jiibuzu, and good luck matching that to your passport at the airport.
I don't know what the problem is for this person, but my name is Christopher. Super white, Christian, and "normal". My bank thinks my name is Christophe because apparently 10 characters is enough for the first name column.
Thank Christ the name limit is not 6.
Christ never had a problem with it
User first name 'Kristen' already taken.
Invalid password. Already in use by Dicska.
It's also fun buying tickets from the Belgian airline, when they tell me that my family name contains illegal characters. Really? Tell me they're invalid or better yet unacceptable, but not that.
Programmers making ui/ux decisions haha. You'll pry 'undefined' from my cold, dead hands
Yea, that's not a real name. You need to put in a real name, like Swaglynn.
My mother-in-law worked at a preschool, and there was actually a little girl named Sexianna.
Ok, that's straight up child abuse.
Ok "Kristen" if that is even your name 🙄
Well done, web form. One less of these damn fakers to wade through. KRISTEN. 👏 ISN'T. 👏 A NAME. 👏
I'd try replacing letters with homoglyphs. Doubt it would work, but not so much that I didn't think it was worth a try.
I mean, first I'd check to make sure I hadn't added any leading/trailing spaces. There does appear to be a lot of space before the K. Might technically be why it isn't working.
Not that the site doesn't still have serious dumb issues even if that is the issue. But yeah.
Pkhrighstehn
There's a lot of whitespace before the name. Any chance they hit the space bar before talking the screen shot?
Aren't names in credit cards all capitalized? Maybe worth trying KRISTEN instead of Kristen.
It's my strawman, I'm making a special appearance in this admiralty court as the settler and natural person. Also, I'm traveling.
Oh shit I gave admiralty court tomorrow! I'm going to give a sovcit speech then instead of insisting the laws don't apply, because I kind of live on the beach, they just only apply if it stays on theme. Community service? Not valid unless they specify 'beach cleanup' or 'cleaning barnacles off of boats'. Jail? No. Has to be ship's brig.
Do you think I can make the judge wear a captains hat and a sword instead of a robe and a hammer?
I never do that and it always works anyway.
Fck Kristen! lol
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