Allows for adding of person with symbols in their name

[nws321]

Adding of name allows for symbols to be included as well.

Example: add n/~!@# p/99999999 e/123@gmail.com t/teste r/teacher is considered a valid name and input to be added

Suggestion: Though I understand in situations where people may have s/o in their names, I think a good improvement would have been further limiting the allowed symbols to prevent for possible input errors by the user.

[soc-pe-bot]

Team's Response

Thank you for the feedback! Our team understands your concerns with regards to the allowance of seemingly random symbols and characters in the name field of our application. However, this is in line with what we have designed our application to be, which we have decided based on the considerations below:

1. Names are not to be limited to present social conventions for naming. A prime example would be "X Æ A-Xii" - Elon Musk's child's name (which even consists of the "Elven" spelling of the word AI). Should these individuals end up having to use our application, such restrictions would definitely be extremely inconvenient.
2. Many established platforms (e.g., social media sites, government portals and contacts applications) allow for different characters & symbols in names, setting a precedent that users expect.

Ultimately, our team decided not to be so restrictive on the validity of names, and give users the flexibility of entering such names, however improbable they might be.

Nonetheless, thank you for the suggestion!

Items for the Tester to Verify

:question: Issue response

Team chose [response.Rejected]

• [x] I disagree

Reason for disagreement: Thank you for your response Team. I get that some people may have special symbols in their names such as s/o which I mentioned in my response. As your app is for NUS CCA Leaders specifically, I think it would not be wrong to assume it will be a Singapore based app and hence follow Singapore requirements for naming conventions. At least when it comes to special characters allowed in things like SingPass, it is only those seen in Image 1 below and not every possible symbol or language. Furthermore for NUS naming convention, as seen in Image 2 below, the examples used for all the races and ethnicities use only alphabetic characters with the exception of the forward slash in s/o for Indian ethnicity. The example you brought up of Elon Musk child's name is one highly specific example of a USA based child that would require just the slight inconvenience of using an acceptable alias instead if there were stricter validation checks for name inputs in the app. I believe a more likely possibility and inconvenience that would occur would be a user who adds in a symbol by accident while typing a valid name and this input is allowed to be logged in without realising if there were no restrictions at all. Hence I have to disagree with your assessment of giving absolute flexibility to the user for name inputs as it would much more likely cause minor inconveniences such as the example I mentioned, as opposed to the very unlikely scenario that a person (probably exchange student) has a name full of symbols not accepted by Singapore naming convention and manages to bypass the required name formats of both Singapore and NUS without having to use an acceptable alias in place before that. All in all, I get the difficulty of managing restrictions and validation as it may be inconsistent across certain platforms (banks, schools, passports), however, there is definitely a good amount of overlap and area to restrict by, and it would be understandable to pick one to follow, rather than having little to no error checking mechanism for the name input at all and allowing all forms of input to bypass.

Image 1: Allowable symbols in names for SingPass

Image 2: Name format for NUS

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