Not everyone has a surname. Not everyone wants a surname Obviously there are workarounds (’–’, ertc.) but I feel like the surname field for characters should be optional. Don’t make me bust out ‘lies programmers believe about names’… 
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So, I agree that real names are not necessarily bipartite with a first and last.
In real-world systems, this is often best resolved by having different ‘forms’ of a name; a “formal name” and “name to address by” that can be any string and do not need to be unique, and then an arbitrary string to uniquely identify the records of the person in question that need not be parseable by any human.
On Wolfery, we have the problem that we need to show something human-readable to uniquely identify a character.
Some similar systems handle this by making names just one string. That runs into a problem where the first person to try for a ‘popular’ name - “John”, say - gets it, while anyone who comes after has to try workarounds like “JohnSmith” or “Johnn” or so on.
Wolfery is attempting to resolve this issue by having two name fields, one that will be shown under most circumstances and one that can provide disambiguation when necessary. We might be able to communicate that more clearly, so it doesn’t seem like we expect surnames are always a thing!
While it would be technically possible to allow a character to not have a secondary disambiguator on their name, I would be very hesitant to do so, because I think it would encourage people to race for the ‘bare’ version of their preferred names as a way of bragging that they were here first.
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Just to make something really explicit - multiple characters are able to have the same “first name” on Wolfery, and so far this has been working pretty well. It causes about as much confusion as people with the same name get anywhere, and it’s definitely helped nudge toward “namelike” names, without the trailing numbers and extra punctuation we tend to see when users need fully unique mononyms.
The primary goal of this is to let players choose the best names for their characters without needing to compete with everyone else who’s already named a character, but not require players to look at machine-generated identifiers to be certain that they’re talking to the person they mean to.
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Conversation starter: How does this go along with one of our most requested features:
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This has been brought up before a few times. I’d like to see it added. I’ve seen like 5 people named ‘snow’. I’d really like a user side toggle box to turn showing last names off.
[Edit] Okay, I realize I didn’t even read the topic. I kinda like the last names. Even if it is particularly cumbersome to people who don’t want to or haven’t thought of one!
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What Kai says here is true.
The surname field being present, while a bit annoying, reduces the intense need to rush to reserve my name because there will always be the possibility of another person with the same first name regardless.
Truth be told, I’d like to get rid of the workaround name -- hijinks too by simply requiring there be at least 2 letters present a-z so people lean a more readable direction with the required surnames at least since we do more or less make people choose something
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The surname is more or less the #0123 at the end of the username. Ultimately, one of the goals is to stop users from from squatting the same desirable color/season/weather/month/element/animal names they always rush to claim-and-the-not-use. The bad vibes when somebody has stolen a name that they don’t intend to even use is pretty obnoxious.
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One legitimate use I have seen for using -- as a surname is when a character’s name doesn’t fit the two name schema that we use in much of the real world. One thought I had to remedy this is to have how a Name-Surname pair is displayed on a profile be variable. I’m gonna call out @Tlancaalek here, as he’s stated in the past that his name is structured in a way that Lek is like his given name and Tlancaa is like his surname.
What if, as a part of the profile, a formatting string is supplied, defaulting to %N %S where %N is a placeholder for the name field, capitalized, and %S is a placeholder for the surname filed, capitalized. Then, if Lek wanted to, he could change his name to name: Lek, Surname: Tlancaa with the formatting field be %S%n, which would reformat his full name to appear as Tlancaalek where full names are used, but simply Lek where only the name field is used, thus eliminating his need for a blank surname field.
Other places I could see this useful are on Far East-styled names, like in Japan and other cultures, where the surname is ordered first, before the given name. I could see a future realm build for an anime focused audience or a Japanese, Chinese, Korean or Vietnamese speaking audience, where the default format string is changed to %S %N instead of what most western-language oriented realms would have.
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I’m trying to resist the temptation to overcomplicate things, but it might be nice to allow for a certain flexibility here if it’s possible to do so without too much trouble.
I’m one case in point, and the above would work for me with sufficient control over what’s formatted when. As with Xetem’s example above, “Tlancaalek” or “Lek” but never “Lek Tlancaa” for example.
As an aside, and by way of referencing the overcomplication I mentioned above, my surname is actually “Tlan,” with the “caa” component being a rank or other social signifier, vaguely similar to how “bin” in the Arabic name “Mohammed bin Salman” means “son of” (“Mohammed, son of Salman”). The order is reversed with my name, of course.
A more interesting case would be Vulvithney, whose shortname is Vith, and who, if memory serves, formatted his name as “Vith” “- Vulvithney”.
I like the direction Xetem’s going with this, though, definitely.
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Ah yes, now I remember Vith also having a less-than-simple naming qualifier.
Theoretically, a formatting box would allow literals too, though because the surname is never used on it’s own in Wolfery at least, it wouldn’t matter too much whether you do
Name:
Lek
Surname:Tlan
Format String: `%Scaa%n
or
Name:
Lek
Surname:Tlancaa
Format String: `%S%n
At least, I wouldn’t think there’d be much of an internal difference.
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I like this.
And I imagine to @Talon’s point, there could be separate formats for the short and long/disambiguation versions of the name, presumably with the most common case pre-populated.
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True. I could see the client defaulting you back to Tlancaalek from Lek if another person enters the room named “Lek Jones” Or something to that effect.
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I think the solution for atypical name conventions is actually to simply have a non-unique assignable Name shown in room available to all users so they can have their official character name for watch, report and otherwise and then a name that shows up in room which also activates triggers for notification and such.
Then you could be Snowdevil of Pixie Destroyers and simply be aliased as “Snow” or “SD” or whatever you assign the alias as. “Jimbob” for all it matters, so long as it shows with hover-text somehow.
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Yes, we need the unique “official” name for each character, which is more than just a single word.
I think the complex formatting options, as suggested by @Xetem is a bit too technical. Works for me. But I want it to work for everyone
This is probably what I would prefer as well. And as default, the first name would be used.
However, that still leaves the question: How to handle [Feature] Duplicate first names in a room?
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Yeah, Acci raises a very good point. It does have to be accessible. I do like Xetem’s solution a great deal, and maybe it’s something that can be made possible “under the hood” without too much trouble, to the sort of person who would dig deeper into Lua scripting or something, but it’s nothing the average user should be expected to deal with.
One of the things I’m reminded of is a friend whose boyfriend tried to get him interested in FurryMuck, and, as I remember him putting it, “bounced off of the UI.” He refuses to touch the place with a ten foot pole.
Which got me thinking: Fuzzball’s syntax is arcane, and I’ve been a frog in slowly boiling water for too long to notice it. But commands like @set me=/_pronouns/maleherm/%a:his and page #prepend ##page|%n|%t##> are, in fact, a great example as to why traditional mucks are every bit a nerd-only solution as chat apps like Wire or Signal.
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Which is why, if we go down that route, the default, i.e. When left blank, would be the same as how it works now.
I think the currently available options are satisfactory for most users, with the one exception of the same first name in a room issue, and the desire to only have a single name. The latter though, which was the original topic of this thread, seems to be settled in that, sorry folks, for everyone’s sanity, you need to pick a surname, or as many others do, an epithet.
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Being forced to put a series of dashes in the last name is a great indicator for those to avoid if you’re looking for quality, long postings. It takes an incredibly basic layer of creativity to come up with a name, or thirty seconds to pull up a list of names from some random website, and just scroll till one that’s acceptable pops up.
The ONLY valid reason to not have a last name is for complex characters like demigods, orphans, and robots that simply don’t have a name. Even then, if a name consists of more than a single word, it’s easy to throw one word in the first box, and the remainder as the surname. Doing it that way also makes commands like whois, watch, summon, and more quicker to type.
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This entire debate could be solved by making the Surname field optional rather than required, and allowing duplicate names.
I’m guessing that in the database, characters are already tracked by some kind of primary key that is not their first and last name.
There are probably thousands of dogs named Spot. Nobody is requiring their owners to begin issuing surnames.
Likewise, there have and always will be hundreds of Seymore Utterthwates in the world. No one is requiring them to change their names because someone has that name already.
King Louis the 2nd’s parents would have found that to be unacceptable.
If anything, enforcing unique names and surnames detracts from the suspension of disbelieve by imposing an artificial constraint that has no reason to exist.
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You need to know the exact character’s name to do a lot of things: mailing them, doing a bunch of building stuffs, etc. Requiring to use some kind of an ID for that is like asking everyone to carry around their ID card so you’d mail some random number instead. I think it’s not exactly practical.
Yes, there are thousands of dogs named Spot. But this is a text roleplay website. It’s designed for people who write stories. I’d think it’s really not that hard to come up with a unique two word name (and if you have issues with that – ask me, I’m more than willing to help!)
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While many people using dashes do seem to simply have trouble with simply thinking of surnames, it’s not necessarily a safe conclusion to jump to in all cases. I object to such generalizations; my other characters have last names, because it’s not inappropriate for them.
My main character has a surname, but not a last name, and for those who can’t conceive of other naming conventions than the western naming conventions they grew up with, I’m hard pressed to consider such limitations my failure of imagination.
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