Tell HN: Google Plus doesn't like my name

Sadly, Goooglers are not unaware of this issue. That's the trouble of problems with Google: at J. Random Megacorp this would be a stupid oversight. Multiple Googlers have brought up internally that this policy would result in them locking accounts of innocent users and they lost the argument. You're quite literally acceptable collateral damage of a core design goal of Google+: for strategic reasons, they want real identity relationships not "Internet identities" which may or may not be pseudonyms. They want Facebook names, not IRC nicks, and they're willing to backstop that with their famous willingness to use individualized customer service. These decisions were internally controversial but supported at the highest levels of the company.

I see things have improved little since the days when I couldn't have a Hotmail account with my real name (because "Cumming" is an offensive term) but I was able to register using the name Ivana Watch-Teenz-Screwing.

PS Went into my archives to check on this and discovered two things:

1. It was actually Ivana Watch-Teens-Give-Head and here are two screen shots that date back to April 2003 showing the denial of my real name and the acceptance of Ivana.

http://i.imgur.com/2bX2o.png

http://i.imgur.com/rO8Jp.png

2. In the same period Google used to serve pornographic ads against my name.

http://i.imgur.com/Z21O3.png

Patrick McKenzie's article mentioned in comment (3) is very important. Most forms and procedures (paper and digital variants) apply unnecessary and incorrect restrictions to field values. The mistakes are carried all the way up into legislation where it is assumed that everyone has a permanent physical address.

Some other very common mistakes include assumptions that people:

* have a physical address

* have one physical address

* use a mobile phone

* use any sort of telephone

* can access the Internet

* use email

* know their mother's maiden name

* have had a pet at some stage

* attended a school (and other password recovery question options...)

* have an occupation

* have one occupation

* have a credit card

* have a bank account

* have 20:20 vision

* can read English and understand what is expected of them in a form

* know their own date of birth/age

* know their own name

* know their place of birth

* have money to print forms, send letters or make phone calls

And importantly, assumptions are made that people will will agree to provide information that is not required for the interaction/transaction.

Common sense usability is to not ask unnecessary questions or collect unnecessary data.

Welcome to Nymwars. There's a reason Google+ has earned itself nothing but contempt from many quarters. Come back to Facebook; as long as you keep clicking their ads, they don't care what you call yourself.

This is why G+ is dead to me. Most of my friends like to use Funny Names On The Internet. And are also early adopters who LEAPT on G+ like starving orphans when it came out, only to find their accounts disabled.

So now the people watching me are mostly... dudes in Egypt who friend anything cute that comes up for a search of "Egypt+female". Who think a photo of their penis is an appropriate icon.

I went back to the rotting husk of LJ.

Fun tangent for the curious:

Odd is a not-unheard-of name in Norway http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Odd_%28name%29

This can make introductions and hand-shaking with visiting English speakers amusing:

"Hello, I'm Odd"

Sadly, there's not much hope. I hear it hasn't improved since my case:

https://plus.google.com/115896012705745653160/posts/Kdg2nPzM...

I guess John Doe would work just fine though.

Google is very "Anglo-centric" in many of its products.

For this kind of thing (and others related to permissible content) I decided to delete my own Google+ account and Google profile. Now I have an old style account that works with their services (even Reader, although you can't share or comment any more), but without the big brother cr*p.

Reminds me a little of xkcd: http://xkcd.com/488/

[Use your real or fake name]

          |                                    |

        (fake)                               (Real)

          \/                                   \/

[You put your content on [You put your content on google+]

your wordpress blog] |

           \/                                   \/

                     [Google G+ flags your account]

           |                                    |

          \/                                   \/

[You create a new fake account] [You spend days desperately trying to get something back]

                                                \/

                                          [Google ignores you because you are not well-known.]

                                                \/

                                          [You create a new fake account]

Violet Blue had her account flagged as not being real.

First Name: "Violet" - well my niece is named Violet. Last Name: "Blue" - as in Allen Blue (Co-founder of LinkedIn: http://www.linkedin.com/in/ablue )

This is why I refuse to use Google+ the flowchart only leads to account being banned. I am moving more and more content off of google systems simply because Google has this ban policy that puts content at risk.

On the other hand if you don't sign up to Google+ then your content hosted is less at risk. However, soon I am sure this will not be an option. Try to sign up for a gmail account now to see what I mean.

Well, you are in the unfortunate position of having a name that would be easily confused for an attempt at SQL injection.

I wonder if folks named "Insert", "And", "Where", "Not" etc would have similar problems...

My name is Chevee.

Google that. I'm pretty sure I'm the only one. I've not been targeted. I don't know how my name could be any less "common" and yet I am ignored?

This begs the question on how arbitrary this process is. Do you have to have a certain level of "popularity" before they decide to investigate? Is it just a bot crawling their DB looking for "uncommon" names?

In Norway, both Even and Odd are normal names.

The only real routes I can see are:

1) Scan passport & send that to Google 2) Change your name to the Hebrew variety and set the transliterated name as your primary yet alternate name

There are huge privacy implications for the first route, however, and @aestetix has a good point in that post about deletion policies and such.

At least they aren't going to kill your Gmail account.

Maybe you can just key-in your name with hebrew characters? That'll teach them.

I been through this, how I did was I told Google that I am sensitive to being found for fraud and phishing, then they allow me to use single letter as my last name. LoL

Not even that uncommon in their scope:

select count() from profiles where first_name='or';

+----------+ | count() | +----------+ | 839 | +----------+

(out of dataset of ~40mil g+ users).

Based on my previous experiences trying to get help from Google, you're pretty much screwed. Just make your name a fake name.

Who cares? It's Google Plus.

It's a racist policy. Common white names are accepted. Certain categories of "ethnic" (non-white) names are not. We also know it's intentional. Google has no intention to change. Draw your own conclusions from this. Case closed.

Tell them your name is Orville Allegheny Smithers the Fifth.

Hey, Google: Here's one problem with your "social" program. Your support is anything but.

Seriously. Stop and think about that, for a minute.

I don't understand, why are you not appealing?

Given that aliases are legal and not in and of themselves considered fraudulent in most of the world, the requirement to use a 'real name' for online services seems to have no real legal basis anyway.