I actually wrote a full-stack web service to handle people's names, specifically to help avoid situations like this. My best advice: treat people's names as a potentially very long and entirely arbitrary text field. Don't assume anything without their confirmation, even if it seems obvious, because somewhere out there someone's name will violate that assumption. My research did conclude that nearly all names are below 500 characters, so that's a reasonable upper bound, though I would at least double it to be safe.
There's a couple of people for you with legal names well past 500 characters, and that's just of Western European descent, where German-style compound words are rare.
Most certainly, percentile wise, they're the 99th. Nearly every case where I encountered a name that long though, there was a shorter form. Generally really long names are either patronymic/matronymic (listing ancestors) like many Arabic names, or names following Hispanic conventions. Hawaiian names can also sometimes be rather impressive.
For instance Pablo Picasso's full name is 103 characters (without whitespace): Pablo Diego José Francisco de Paula Juan Nepomuceno María de los Remedios Cipriano de la Santísima Trinidad Ruiz y Picasso
Worked with a guy with a really long set of names. Found out much later that what I thought was his first name (which he went by) was actually the initials of his names before the family name.
That's a pretty common way for people to modify their names into a more practical form (I'm sure typing all that out is a pain). This is why you shouldn't ever assume properties of people's names, and should instead write UIs which confirm the name's properties with the user.
Just for fun, I wrote a quick query to pull the head from my DB.
NAME_LENGTH_CHARS, NAME_TEXT
91 'Mary Abigail KawenaʻUlaokalaniahiʻIakaikapoliopelekawahineʻAihonuaināleilehuaapele Wiggin Pukui'
85 'Upatissa Atapattu Bandaranayake Wasala Mudiyanse Ralahamilage Shirani Anshumala Bandaranayake'
83 'Wanisekara Bandaranayake Wasala Mudiyanse Ralahamilage Aluwihare Uda Walauwe Alick Aluwihare'
68 'Guido Georg Friedrich Erdmann Heinrich Adalbert Graf Henckel von Donnersmarck'
66 'Wasalakulathunga Wijekoon Mudiyanselage Duleeka Kumari Wijekoon Marapana'
65 'Clemens Erwein Heinrich Karl Bonaventura Freiherr von und zu Franckenstein'
59 'Guillaume Joseph Hyacinthe Jean-Baptiste Le Gentil de la Galaisière'
58 'Weerasooriya Dissanayake Mudiyanselage Punchi Banda Dissanayake'
56 'Charles de Marguetel de Saint-Denis, seigneur de Saint-Évremond'
56 'Venerable Professor Kollupitiye Mahinda Sangharakkhitha Thera'
...
(EDIT TO ADD: These are all names initially sourced from Wikipedia)
No these are all names of public figures pulled from Wikipedia, not names submitted by individuals, because of the obvious privacy violations. Each name has a corresponding Wikipedia article. I should have clarified initially though.
What does "naturally" even mean here? Everyone these days seems to be giving their kids unique names. Some people name their kid Obi-wan Kenobi. That's not really any different than these people, is it?
Obi-wan Kenobi isn't all that odd --- to someone unknown to Star Wars, it wouldn't stand out among a list of other foreign-sounding names.
On the other hand, an ultra-long name that seems to be designed for testing overflows, in buffers mental or physical, is like a very different category to me.
> treat people's names as a potentially very long and entirely arbitrary text field
The problem is that you still need to deal with unicode attacks, sql attacks, js attacks, css attacks, regex attacks, etc. There's nothing 'arbitrary' about sanitizing any user-inputted text field, and it's especially difficult to do so a culturally sensitive way.
It's a good problem you're solving though. It's a great job interview question to have people write some code and talk through, since to get someone's first name given their full name it takes maybe 20 minutes to write something that works 99% of the time, but then to write something that works 99.99% of the time it takes maybe 20 years.
> since to get someone's first name given their full name
I never understood why that's necessary in the first place. Simply have inputs called "full name" and "address" and let people type in whatever, similar to how many websites now have "name" and "title" (as in Mr, Mrs, Reverend, ...), which is a partial and culturally insensitive solution to a similar problem.
The biggest problem with this strategy is it isn't idiomatic to refer to someone by their full name in many contexts. However given its simplicity, and cultural neutrality, a single full name field should be the default choice IMO.
This is basically what Alphanym does, though it presents the nickname field conditionally, to optimize the sign up flow for fewer fields whenever possible.
If you have sanitize the name field because then you're doing everything wrong. Nothing should break no matter what characters a user puts in their name. Even if they use punctuation or null bytes or control characters.
> If you have sanitize the name field because then you're doing everything wrong.
If you don’t write software under the assumption that every other developer and all your users are at best wildly incompetent and at worst outright malicious then you’re doing everything wrong.
languages with logo graphic writing systems, such as Chinese and Japanese. I think for governmental purposes there is a set of allowed characters, but people may consider the true form of their name to be written with a rare character that's not in unicode.
While still in the Unicode realm, some people have names that can only be spelled in their native script vertically. For instance people with Manchu names. This case breaks Wikipedia's formatting in comical ways.
But surely there must be some point where it’s okay to build a software application that expects some sort of personal identification, right? At some point surely it’s okay to cover some vast majority of people’s names and allow the rest of people to type in whatever they want? I don’t really see a problem unless you require a name to conform to some specific format while also having a policy against users using “fake” names.
I believe this is a dying problem. The next social media will be based around a real life user.
First name, last name, photo, home address(or similar). Everything verified or at least enough for people to feel like they are talking to real people.
Given how easily reddit is astroturfed by Aldi, Tmobile, Samsung, Tesla, Donald Trump, and more, the next gen social media will revolve around real people rather than usernames and corporate accounts.
I don't think that accounts for lazy or ignorant programmers trying to limit joke/abusive accounts, though. And that's what the problem has always been.
Even accepting your premise as as true (which I don't necessarily), social media isn't the only space in which this problem appears.
The article itself mentions "members of British Parliament [being] blocked from viewing the Sexual Offences Bill they had proposed by a government spam filter"[0] and "the London Horniman museum’s emails [being] flagged because systems thought they meant 'horny man'"[1].
> First name, last name, photo, home address(or similar). Everything verified or at least enough for people to feel like they are talking to real people.
I wish that was a list like that could be added to because I would add:
41. Full adjectives and adverbs can appear in names. Some folks didn't get fancy and add prefixes and suffixes like the Europeans. You might even encounter a family name that is a whole phrase.
A similar problem happens when the name itself is only considered offensive in certain cultures, but is completely benign in the culture of the person with the name. I remember two gaming related incidents where people were blocked from making accounts; one was a south american using "negro" as his username being prevented from creating an account, even though english speakers with the username "black" are fine; the other was a muslim with the first name "Jihad" who couldn't create a playstation account. A muslim coworker told me that "jihad" being synonymous with "holy war" is pretty much just a western thing, it could also be referring to an internal struggle, so it's similar to christians naming a child "Chastity".
> A muslim coworker told me that "jihad" being synonymous with "holy war" is pretty much just a western thing, it could also be referring to an internal struggle, so it's similar to christians naming a child "Chastity".
Which actually explains a lot about the infamous quote, "The main character, Spongebob, lives inside a giant pineapple. How do you think he acquired that house? Through jihad."
He struggled in life to improve his standard of living to the point where he managed to accomplish having an undersea pineapple to live in? I don't know, man.
I think the real problem that is totally overlooked is the whole authoritarian nature of this paternalism of monitoring people as to their "offensiveness". It's pure and unadulterated authoritarianism and controlling to declare yourself as the moral arbiter of what is and isn't offensive and what should and shouldn't be allowed. And no, it's not a matter of whether you CAN legally do so, it's a matter of whether you SHOULD be an authoritarian dictator.
How about giving people a choice instead of playing Little Lord Fauntleroy and controlling everyone's actions. How about just giving users the option to block "offensive" or even just possibly "offensive" names and terms and words, instead of going all paternalistic jerk.
It is something that has bothered me for a long while now, especially in places like Reddit, where the whole fundamental concept of the site was totally and utterly undermined by the authoritarian mod squad that makes the whole community voting/self-regulation a facade when it's not being used by the angry mob to metaphorically burn the witch that dared to say something that wasn't their favorite thing to hear.
There is also this idea in the US that typing somewhere fuck or shit is unacceptable.
I am French and we have our dirty words which can be pit to good use or misused. An adult using them judiciously may help their message going through. It must not be overused, there is a specific balance to find.
Nobody will, however, type m....e because it means that the word should not have been there in the first place.
Bleeping such words looks like fake puritanism to me. Either use them and face the music or say crotte.
> Take the case of Jennifer Null, for instance, whose name was frequently rejected in input fields because the program treated her last name as a form of code, rather than text
For all those who say javascript the language is fine: ^^
She should change her first name to
'or 1=1;drop table customers;commit;--', sit back, and watch the fireworks.
by the way, best use case of this I've ever seen? It was pasted on a sticker on a car's bumper, right below the license plate, in a nice easy to read/OCR font. Now, I've no idea if the speed/traffic/tracking cameras read it and acted on it or not, but the idea amused me.
If you have already coerced the variable to be a string, then you can end up with with a null value becoming the string "null". E.g. the below statement evaluates to true:
new String(null)=="null"
And it used to be a lot easier to make that mistake like something with:
As for JavaScript, I recall how I registered an account with user name "undefined" for TheDailyWTF article comments. Later they moved their comment system and forums to Discourse and due to some bug my account was linked under every item in the list of likes under every post.
In the early 80s I worked with a guy who wanted an unlisted phone number (back in the days of paper telephone directories). He was really miffed at the idea that the phone company would charge him an extra $10 (or similar) per year for this "service". ("Ten dollars to NOT do something?!? That's extortion!") He couldn't believe this so he asked for a list of service charges which they mailed to his home. Apparently changing your name was free. So, for several years you could call "Kirk, James T., Capt." I guess he showed them.
Bonus: saved $10 per year.
Extra bonus: frequent crank calls at all hours, for free.
The mods discourage humor because it tends to metastasize into tedious offtopic threads, which I guess is true enough.
Readers think they punish bad jokes and reward good ones, but the stupid Butts pun is doing great while the absurdist gem about Leonard Nimoy secretly wanting to be Kirk and living it out for a year in the white pages (and then someone working with him forgetting his name!) was nuked from orbit.
That was the HN of yore. Now it's much closer to Reddit circa 2011. Reddit is now Facebook circa 2010. (I don't know what fb is these days, but it doesn't sound good).
The mods here should have capped new accounts years ago and permanently welded the lid closed.
People have been complaining about HN turning into Reddit for at least 10 years. In fact, the HN guidelines used to ask people not to complain about HN turning into Reddit ("it's a semi-noob illusion"). But when we augmented the guidelines a year or so ago, we took out that one to preserve brevity.
I worked at an ISP in the '90s, and our first paid customer was John Blank. On several occasions, a well-meaning biller would delete his account because it was "obvious a test".
The only safe thing to assume about the validity of family names is that people may or may not have one, and that if they do, it is probably (but not guaranteed to be) composed of a series of Unicode-space characters.
Ahhh, I'm being down voted for saying this isn't actually hard.
Maybe having the last name Butts on the internet IS hard after all.
(In case it's not clear, this is my last name)
The only trouble I have ever had was Facebook locking me out of my account in 2011 and making me send them a photo of my ID before being let back in. Took a month.
The funny thing is I have a random Facebook account with a totally fake city and name for a character in a game I play, and never had any trouble with that!
Never had a registration problem on any site, though.
As George Carlin pointed out[1], it's the context of the use of language that determines whether it's good or bad. So machine learning just sucks at determining context. Trying to get people to stop being offended by the utterance of arbitrary sounds probably will never happen, but at least we can make computers less stupid.
This sparked a memory of sprinter Tyson Gay’s last name being automatically edited[0] to be “less offensive”(?) by a religious org’s news website. Simply searching for and replacing certain words is bound to fail.
Native Americans have the fun problem of taking a lot of grief (and some Facebook deletions[3]) for last names like "Yellow Bird", "Good Iron", "Walking Eagle", and "Has No Horses". In fact, I was a little disappointed with a thread on this and some of the logic[1][2].
I haven't run into this problem yet, but I certainly expect to at some point. Especially since my last name is even a bit more suggestive than simply 'butts' or 'weiner'.
Hmmm, I mean, on Wikipedia, does anyone want to see user names that aren’t pseudonymous?
I think the policy is more likely to favor names that are not identifiable in the real world.
So nonsense like “Snarf_Yorble” is preferred to “Danny_DeVito” even if Danny DeVito himself is trying to help write an article about the TV show, Taxi, by citing some good sources to fill in blanks and rectify some subtle errors via the talk page.
Favoring handles and nicknames keeps attention focused on the content or data, and not the authors, to retain a degree of objectivity. Merit badges are there, not to promote credit, but credible accuracy and reliable behavior.
When I was in elementary school, the Vice Principal's name was Mr. Butts. That was uproariously funny to my young self. Now I kind of feel bad for the guy, being the brunt of an endless stream potty humor from "clever" pre-teens..
True although that doesn't mean they're getting what they deserve. If you want to be an educator, or have any normal occupation, you shouldn't be forced to change your identity.
The 2 vice principals in my Junior High at one point were James Slaughter (he did the paddling) and Seymour Butz. Butz had this huge James Earl Jones voice that just boomed down the hallways... No one made fun of him within his hearing.
I have an ø in my name. It is especially annoying when entering payment details and I have to input my name as it appears on my credit card. It is surprisingly often that only ascii is accepted. I would guess the anglo-internet is hell if you're from Asia.
I pretty much never input my name as it appears on my credit card. I have yet to have anyone (in person or online) complain about this, despite instructions saying to do so.
(Specifically, my middle initial appears on my credit card, but I never fill it in when buying stuff online.)
"I have to input my name as it appears on my credit card"
This is only true with AMEX as they are the only major processor that checks the inputed name.
Visa and Mastercard do not check on the name at all - you can use any strings you like.
All of the online shopping and ordering I do (including Amazon, etc.) is with a made up First/Last. I have done this for almost 15 years with various Visa cards with no problems.
In Germany, transliterations are widespread and officially accepted. Ö=OE, Ä=AE, Ü=UE, ß=SS makes it fine to write Hübner as Huebner even in the passport and other official documents. I wonder why other countries do not allow transliterations as a legal way to deal with anglo-centric character sets?
Romanization/anglicization can be tough for many languages. Thai for example has vowels that do not have an equivalent in English, and presents the added difficulty of being tonal, which means even if the pronunciation is anglicized, the tonality will be lost. Former example, the name of the former king of Thailand was typically written "Bhumibol Adulyadej" but the pronunciation is closer to the alternate "Phumiphon Adunyadet" and neither really hits all the notes in the way it actually sounds when spoken (although I admit I can't think of a better way to write it in the English alphabet).
It's only going to get worse - more and more systems are replaced with "AI" which in return produces the worst case of "computer says no" - with the older systems, customer service could at least override the system, with the newer ones it becomes increasingly difficult to do so. Even simpler technologies like voice recognition are incredibly shit if you have an accent or a surname that's not recognised by English "speaking" voice recogniser(support lines where you have to say your surname to get connected to someone are the worst).
On the topic of voice recognition systems, my old flip phone had a voice recognition system where you had to first record yourself saying the name of your contact before being able to call said contact.
Once you got past that initial step it was much much more reliable than today's voice recognition systems on Android phones, especially for "foreign" names.
I’m guessing fread looks like an attempt at code injection (fread() is a POSIX C function to read from a file handle, but also present in e.g. PHP), and WAF stands for Web Application Firewall.
I've known families with surnames like Weiner and Skanky (who had a bunch of girls, I always felt sorry for them with a last name of Skanky). I imagine they must have this same issue.
I was good friends with a daughterful Skanky family growing up - almost wonder if it was the same one.
Much in the same way that the pronunciation of harassment over-corrected to "hare-es-ment" for a while in the 90s (avoiding "her-ass-ment"), they led the pronunciation of their name towards Skanchy, like Scrunchy, or Crunchy before relenting.
148 comments
[ 3.1 ms ] story [ 224 ms ] threadThese names need to be on those "things programmers believe about names that are false" lists closer to the top[2].
[1] - https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Caterina_Fake [2] - https://www.kalzumeus.com/2010/06/17/falsehoods-programmers-...
https://www.alphanym.com/demo
There's a couple of people for you with legal names well past 500 characters, and that's just of Western European descent, where German-style compound words are rare.
For instance Pablo Picasso's full name is 103 characters (without whitespace): Pablo Diego José Francisco de Paula Juan Nepomuceno María de los Remedios Cipriano de la Santísima Trinidad Ruiz y Picasso
The last name's list on the other hand can be technically infinite but only the first two (from both: father and mother) are used normally.
You can have also as many pseudonyms as you want of course, but they aren't official names.
Just for fun, I wrote a quick query to pull the head from my DB.
(EDIT TO ADD: These are all names initially sourced from Wikipedia)For instance:
On the other hand, an ultra-long name that seems to be designed for testing overflows, in buffers mental or physical, is like a very different category to me.
The problem is that you still need to deal with unicode attacks, sql attacks, js attacks, css attacks, regex attacks, etc. There's nothing 'arbitrary' about sanitizing any user-inputted text field, and it's especially difficult to do so a culturally sensitive way.
It's a good problem you're solving though. It's a great job interview question to have people write some code and talk through, since to get someone's first name given their full name it takes maybe 20 minutes to write something that works 99% of the time, but then to write something that works 99.99% of the time it takes maybe 20 years.
I never understood why that's necessary in the first place. Simply have inputs called "full name" and "address" and let people type in whatever, similar to how many websites now have "name" and "title" (as in Mr, Mrs, Reverend, ...), which is a partial and culturally insensitive solution to a similar problem.
Nickname:
and then refer to them by their nickname, which can be whatever they like to be called, in whatever land they come from
and no programmer has to care about human naming conventions ever again
If you don’t write software under the assumption that every other developer and all your users are at best wildly incompetent and at worst outright malicious then you’re doing everything wrong.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Nurhaci
First name, last name, photo, home address(or similar). Everything verified or at least enough for people to feel like they are talking to real people.
Given how easily reddit is astroturfed by Aldi, Tmobile, Samsung, Tesla, Donald Trump, and more, the next gen social media will revolve around real people rather than usernames and corporate accounts.
The article itself mentions "members of British Parliament [being] blocked from viewing the Sexual Offences Bill they had proposed by a government spam filter"[0] and "the London Horniman museum’s emails [being] flagged because systems thought they meant 'horny man'"[1].
[0] http://news.bbc.co.uk/2/hi/uk_politics/2723851.stm [1] http://www.newsshopper.co.uk/news/533121.Name_of_museum_is_c...
'Retweeting' needs to carry social risk to be high quality. Right now all social media is just a mad scramble for short-term attention metrics.
Unless, of course, the service refuses to acknowledge that some real people exist because they're not white enough. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Facebook_real-name_policy_cont...
41. Full adjectives and adverbs can appear in names. Some folks didn't get fancy and add prefixes and suffixes like the Europeans. You might even encounter a family name that is a whole phrase.
Which actually explains a lot about the infamous quote, "The main character, Spongebob, lives inside a giant pineapple. How do you think he acquired that house? Through jihad."
None can use their real names on certain services like Facebook.
http://mw.eco.br/ig/prof/ReinhardtAdolfoFuck.htm
http://www.nie.edu.sg/profile/chew-shit-fun
https://www.policiacivil.go.gov.br/ex-diretores/hitler-musso...
How about giving people a choice instead of playing Little Lord Fauntleroy and controlling everyone's actions. How about just giving users the option to block "offensive" or even just possibly "offensive" names and terms and words, instead of going all paternalistic jerk.
It is something that has bothered me for a long while now, especially in places like Reddit, where the whole fundamental concept of the site was totally and utterly undermined by the authoritarian mod squad that makes the whole community voting/self-regulation a facade when it's not being used by the angry mob to metaphorically burn the witch that dared to say something that wasn't their favorite thing to hear.
I am French and we have our dirty words which can be pit to good use or misused. An adult using them judiciously may help their message going through. It must not be overused, there is a specific balance to find.
Nobody will, however, type m....e because it means that the word should not have been there in the first place.
Bleeping such words looks like fake puritanism to me. Either use them and face the music or say crotte.
For all those who say javascript the language is fine: ^^
by the way, best use case of this I've ever seen? It was pasted on a sticker on a car's bumper, right below the license plate, in a nice easy to read/OCR font. Now, I've no idea if the speed/traffic/tracking cameras read it and acted on it or not, but the idea amused me.
https://xkcd.com/327/
And []+[] = "" And []+{} = [object Object] And {}+[] = 0 And {}+{} = NaN
new String(null)=="null"
And it used to be a lot easier to make that mistake like something with:
""+a
Which different browsers handled differently.
Edit: To all the Nulls, thanks for the downvotes.
As for JavaScript, I recall how I registered an account with user name "undefined" for TheDailyWTF article comments. Later they moved their comment system and forums to Discourse and due to some bug my account was linked under every item in the list of likes under every post.
https://stackoverflow.com/q/4456438/149341
In the early 80s I worked with a guy who wanted an unlisted phone number (back in the days of paper telephone directories). He was really miffed at the idea that the phone company would charge him an extra $10 (or similar) per year for this "service". ("Ten dollars to NOT do something?!? That's extortion!") He couldn't believe this so he asked for a list of service charges which they mailed to his home. Apparently changing your name was free. So, for several years you could call "Kirk, James T., Capt." I guess he showed them. Bonus: saved $10 per year. Extra bonus: frequent crank calls at all hours, for free.
Funny thing is I can't remember his real name.
But even so, why would anyone downvote this?
Readers think they punish bad jokes and reward good ones, but the stupid Butts pun is doing great while the absurdist gem about Leonard Nimoy secretly wanting to be Kirk and living it out for a year in the white pages (and then someone working with him forgetting his name!) was nuked from orbit.
The mods here should have capped new accounts years ago and permanently welded the lid closed.
https://imgur.com/gallery/MeMGmx4
Maybe having the last name Butts on the internet IS hard after all.
(In case it's not clear, this is my last name)
The only trouble I have ever had was Facebook locking me out of my account in 2011 and making me send them a photo of my ID before being let back in. Took a month.
The funny thing is I have a random Facebook account with a totally fake city and name for a character in a game I play, and never had any trouble with that!
Never had a registration problem on any site, though.
[1] https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=mUvdXxhLPa8 (trigger warning: comedy)
[0] http://languagelog.ldc.upenn.edu/nll/?p=294
https://www.reddit.com/r/xboxone/comments/9a0wuc/my_name_is_...
1) https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=7364933
2) https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=7367657
3) https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=9025246
You wouldn't think a lot of sites check for a minimum name length, but they do.
A pain since I have a lot of people with short Asian surnames (and a "first" name which isn't always the one they go by).
You have a username policy: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wikipedia:Username_policy
You have a notice board for blatant violations of policy (although it gets used for a lot of other stuff): https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wikipedia:Usernames_for_admini...
You have a holding pen for usernames that have been reported but not yet blocked, for further monitoring: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wikipedia:Usernames_for_admini...
Because the username policy isn't enough policy the UAA and UAA Holding pen have their own instructions: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wikipedia:Requests_for_comment...
And because two different pages to report usernames to isn't enough there's yet another for things that aren't as blatant as UAA: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wikipedia:Requests_for_comment...
It's actively hostile to people with names like those mentioned in the article.
I think the policy is more likely to favor names that are not identifiable in the real world.
So nonsense like “Snarf_Yorble” is preferred to “Danny_DeVito” even if Danny DeVito himself is trying to help write an article about the TV show, Taxi, by citing some good sources to fill in blanks and rectify some subtle errors via the talk page.
Favoring handles and nicknames keeps attention focused on the content or data, and not the authors, to retain a degree of objectivity. Merit badges are there, not to promote credit, but credible accuracy and reliable behavior.
The 2 vice principals in my Junior High at one point were James Slaughter (he did the paddling) and Seymour Butz. Butz had this huge James Earl Jones voice that just boomed down the hallways... No one made fun of him within his hearing.
(Specifically, my middle initial appears on my credit card, but I never fill it in when buying stuff online.)
This is only true with AMEX as they are the only major processor that checks the inputed name.
Visa and Mastercard do not check on the name at all - you can use any strings you like.
All of the online shopping and ordering I do (including Amazon, etc.) is with a made up First/Last. I have done this for almost 15 years with various Visa cards with no problems.
Could be different since I'm not in the US.
I argued that changing Ø to O was just as wrong as a Norwegian some time ago perhaps changing her name's W to V, and that was obviously unacceptable.
(I'm not sure how realistic this is, but I've seen an old child's alphabet poster that didn't include W.)
https://upload.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/commons/1/19/Bhumibol...
Once you got past that initial step it was much much more reliable than today's voice recognition systems on Android phones, especially for "foreign" names.
Much in the same way that the pronunciation of harassment over-corrected to "hare-es-ment" for a while in the 90s (avoiding "her-ass-ment"), they led the pronunciation of their name towards Skanchy, like Scrunchy, or Crunchy before relenting.