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When a user signs up for Box, he is asked to enter FirstName and LastName as separate fields. But Box doesn't keep these as separate fields, so when our app queries the Box API to get a user's name, we get both the FirstName and the LastName as one concatenated string as FirstName, with nothing in LastName.

We confirmed this problem simply by looking at https://app.box.com/profile: if you want to edit your user name, you get the entire name within a single text box.

This presents problems for us in terms of mailing our users: we want to address people by FirstName since this greatly increases the odds that someone will read their email e.g. "Hi John" rather than "Hi John Smith".

This problem needs to get solved with Box, rather than a third-party app, because there is no easy way for an app to write a regex that can accurately split a string into FirstName and LastName.

Latin American names, for example, frequently have double first names and double last names, e.g. "Maria Anna Ramirez Fernandez". A third-party app cannot simply take the first part of the string ("Maria") and get a complete FirstName out of this; we need Box to tell us that "Maria Anna" is the FirstName and "Ramirez Fernandez" is the "LastName".

Arun
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  • What do you do with people whose first name is the family name and last name is their individual name – mmmmmm Jul 22 '14 at 21:20
  • This appears to be a bug report, not a programming question. Please read ["What topics can I ask about here?"](http://stackoverflow.com/help/on-topic) – Scott Solmer Jul 22 '14 at 21:20
  • Also you don't know me so address me as Mr Surnname or do you want to be rude? – mmmmmm Jul 22 '14 at 21:21
  • Mark: yes, this is a common issue, e.g. with Chinese names, but addressing someone as "Hi FamilyName" because FamilyName == FirstName is generally OK within Asian culture. Addressing someone as "Mr LastName" is correct in a formal sense, but unusual in a modern context. The emails we send go from the CEO's personal email account, and include the CEO's direct phone number so we are trying to make a direct 1:1 connection with users, and have succeeded very well so far. @Okuma.Scott: Sorry if I misposted; I was under the impression this is how Box is handling dev feedback, with items tagged Box – Arun Jul 23 '14 at 19:56
  • It's the way I note spammers a professional will call me Mr X , Calling me Mark says you know me and if you don't you are a liar – mmmmmm Jul 25 '14 at 11:16
  • I got in touch with Box directly, but, yeah, thanks for trolling. – Arun Jul 26 '14 at 17:34
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    This question appears to be off-topic because it is about an internet service not development – mmmmmm Aug 29 '14 at 20:40

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