US/UK web and database developers: not everyone has a zip/post code! (Warning: lame)

The BBQ Pit
1

If you’re marketing your products to the WHOLE FUCKING WORLD, make your stupid damn database and web interface able to cope with international addresses.

It’s very useful to plot the demographics by Zip or postcode. And by standardized phone number. The US and the UK are pretty clever and systematic about your postal addressing. And quite efficient too. But not every country enjoys the benefit of such a system, and furthermore not every country needs it.

Examples of full international addresses:

Mr Chan
10, Main Street
Hong Kong

The O’Reilly family
Wexford
Ireland

They don’t fit into a standard format, do they? By all means, set your forms up to handle and classify US/UK addresses correctly, but when you make the form inadmissible because the zip/postal code isn’t five numbers in a row/two blocks of numbers and letters, or we don’t actually have a state, county, or province, or whatnot, WE CAN’T SUBMIT THE FUCKING FORM. Which means WE CAN’T BUY YOUR PRODUCTS. While I’m at it, the + sign means “code required to dial internationally”. This code differs from country to country, so the plus sign is a very efficient way of indicating that you dial whatever your country’s international code is. Thus “+353” means “international code + country code for Ireland”. If you insist on having your form interface say “please enter area code” expecting only three digits, or your database can’t handle anything other than digits, you’re never going to be able to call me. Not that I want you to anyway, so maybe it’s a good thing.

And if I do manage to get through the stupid forms, I end up with shit addressed to

jjimm
Anyco Ltd.
24 Madeup Street
Dublin 3
Dublin
Ireland
Ireland
00000

Which is not particularly conducive to getting my mail delivered.

Most of the time it’s not a problem with the database, it’s a problem with the jerk who designed it. Makes me want to slap you all upside the head.

You slap stupid slap arse biscuits! slap *slap slap

Note: does not apply to all internationally-oriented US and UK web-based forms. Just most of them.

2

My word.

Sydney, NSW is in Australia.
Sydney, NS is in Canada!

If you web designers are too thick to provide a State/Province field which can handle three characters, then make it a freakin’ optional field. Getting rapped over the knuckles electronically with a “Some fields were missing/incomplete (you foreign MORON!)” message pisses me off no end when I’m trying to enter my correct bloody address.

3

jjimm, I’m pretty sure that if you sent a letter to “The O’Reilly Family, Wexford, Ireland” the post office wouldn’t know what to do with it.

Now “The O’Reilly Family, Bastardstown*, Wexford, Ireland”, or something else narrowing it down to which O’Reilly family in Wexford, might get there.

As for the OP, it’s usually possible to work around it somehow. My postcode (and yours, I presume) is Dublin 7, so if I have to enter a zip code I usually put 00007; on a UK site I’ll put D0 0O7 and it usually works. (I’m not sure how the culchies would work it, maybe just lots of O’s and 0’s.) I also send a note to the webmaster politely pointing out their mistake.

But, I agree with the sentiment of your post completely. It really is arrogant of these designers not to take the rest of the world into account.

[sub]*yes, there really is such a place[/sub]

4

jjimm, I was a translator who lived in Japan and wrote to relatives back in England before postal codes were common before I got into database design. That’s why when setting up something that requires people enter an address or phone number, unless I’m sure it won’t be used outside the United Staates, I allow for that. To me, to do anything less is some combination of lazy, incompetent, and/or unprofessional. Then again, I’m no longer a programmer in title.

It’s a sad world when an administrative assistant can outcode a web designer.

CJ

5

Au contraire - this was based on a real-life example (with the name changed to protect the innocent). His is the only “O’Reilly” family in Wexford Town, and mail addressed thus gets to him fine. Probably an anomaly, but a genuine one.

6

If you wrote a letter to my mum at:

Her name
Gooloogong
Australia

…she would receive it. If you omitted the word “Australia” she would still probably recieve it if the letter was posted from a place like the UK, where the letter sorters would be likely to guess it is an Aussie sounding placename.

Just to clarify, it’s the only place with that name in Australia. It has a population of only 250, and no mail delivery, so residents need to go to the post office to collect their mail. Heck, I reckon it’d be possible to use her first name only, and with the two words (first name and town), you could get a letter to her from London.

As a postal worker, I have seen lots of cases like this. It is especially common in Australia, the UK, and Ireland.

7

Sounds like a challenge! :smiley:

8

I feel for you brother, I feel for you.

I confess I … got a bit irate with a customer service representative in the States from a financial institution I deal with on personal issues because she couldn’t quite grasp the concept that I have no postal code.

Yes, it is true, no proper postal code (at home). In fact to get to my house (and it is even in, well, a diplomatic neighborhood shall we say) one gives directions. Even postal, it’s along the lines of:

Villa X
Neighborhood Y
Nr Corner of Famous all Xian girls college and [somewhat infamous hotel whose business is somewhat ‘daily diplo’]
City
Country

I’m afriad this just does not go over well.
(*: I do like my walks back for lunchtime)

9

So, how many countries actually have postcodes?
I seem to think that there are very few who don’t - maybe just the places you have lived, jjimm!

And yes, while it annoys me to be unable to fill in a foreign form where the postcode field is mandatory, the invention of postcodes is a interesting pastime, allowing you to bin the dross you subsequently get in the post
In fact, I have even used B1N 1T as a postcode.

curly chick
number, road
Dublin 11
B1N 1T
Ireland

The forms which really drive me to violence are the ones with the next level of validation
That is an invalid postcode. Please enter in the correct format

No order for them, then.
Go and have a coffee and a smoke and when the calm descends decide that I didn’t really need the whatsit anyway.
€X more money for beer for me.

10

Aha, well, the name change makes all the difference there.

I’ve been able to receive mail that was addressed incorrectly because my name is (by Irish standards) so unusual even in central Dublin that the post office recognise it now. I don’t imagine a Catherine O’Connor would have the same luck.

11

Sorry, I did pick a bad example.

12

Email me if you feel up to it. :smiley:

13

I totaly agree, I usually just add in random numbers and letters till it works. It still makes me GRRRRRRR though.
Like Aus, our posties are fairly on to it. I once lived in a suburb called Takapuna. My brother in-law (in Scotland) adressed his letter to Pakapuna. After trying Papakura first they finally delivered the letter…all without a postcode :slight_smile:

14

The other stupid thing is, if they’re mining the data and requiring non-US or non-UK style data, they’re going to end up with degraded demographics, due to all the people who’ve filled in “Fuckoffsville, 12345” and the like.

15

calm kiwi, you’re right there. In Australia, we have many multiple occurences of the same placename, and for uncoded mail, you’ll see a postal worker has written:

…and the sorters in each incorrect state will cross out theirs, and send it to the next one.

New Zealand has a weird postcode system though. Seems everywhere has a code, but they are rarely used. Just Kiwis being cool again…

I just use 90210 for US sites that insist on a five digit “zip”. They must really get sick of that. :smiley:

16

Actually, you lot might appreciate the work of this bloke in South Australia. His address includes such things as “Shout ‘trousers!’ when delivering this, or mother will get angry and start shooting!” It’s in the vein of the more well-known US Postal Experiments (which has been doing the online rounds for a few years), but with an Aussie bent, and using text rather than weird objects.

Definitely worth a look. The US one is a laugh too, if you’ve never seen it.

17

This is a HUGE problem in some of the home-grown CRM software that I’ve been called in to consult on. Typically, the problem lies with a company with too much money setting a specification for recording a person’s info in the database as:

Name
Address
Phone
e-mail
Fax

And then this is turned over to 18-22 year-old vo-tech students who, although often sharp people, have very limited experience in actual programming or in life in general.

On the programming standpoint, CRM software is often considered a “thankless, boring, and mind-scramblingly repetitive task”, and thus gets turned over to the “grunt” programmers. People who are typically of low experience level in writing fault-tolerant and easily extensible and flexible applications.

On the personal standpoint, very few of the CRM developers I’ve met have ever been outside of the US, or if they have it’s because they are Indian. So, as you can imagine, you see the following sorts of things:

  • Not enough entires for complicated addresses.
  • Name fields that are woefully too short.
  • Postal code fields that only take numbers.
  • Phone number fields sans country code.

Hell, I’ve even seen a major CRM system that was designed for a multinational firm which had more than 30,000 contacts entered into it, none of which had a country entered with them, because someone forgot to add that field, and the admin assistants they hired to type in 30,000 names just started putting anyone outside of the US in the State of “Alaska” (via the “State” drop-down), and putting their actual country in the street address - sometimes.! :eek: I took one look at it, and said “Guys? I’m impressed - of your 30,000 plus contacts, more than 20,000 of them are in Alaska alone. You must freaking rule the business in that State.”

Of course, no records were kept, and so many of the actual countries for these people were lost. And, nearly 18 months later, they still haven’t added “Country” to the database, because somehow that “created instability in their web server”, and no one could figure it out. :rolleyes:

Seriously? Can you imagine that? This is a paraphrase of an actual conversation in front of me, when I was investigating it: “Hey, Alice, how many sales contacts do we have in Nigeria?” “Well, Bob, looking through the list of ‘Alaska’ entires, I see…well, this name might be Nigerian.”

“It could be eskimo too.” (sorry for using the non-politically correct name, I’m trying to repeat the conversation as closely as possible)

“Maybe. But this city…I think it’s in Nigeria. Just Google them…and this person lives on ‘England’ street. That could mean they live in England.” :rolleyes:

Lame rant? Not when jobs depend on it.

18

Anthracite, sounds like we worked for similar organizations: I worked for one of the world’s first online retail trading portals (amazingly, they managed to predict the future and become a dot-com bankruptcy 3 years before everyone else managed it!). Most of the manufacturers were in China and the Middle East. Most of the purchasers were in the US and Europe. The thing relied on being internationalized.

The database was designed by a senior ex-Very Big Company database developer and his team. They’d put it together: without enough fields for complex addresses; with only 9 digits allowed for phone numbers; with “State” mandatory for all countries, but a list comprising only US states. One good thing he’d done was that it cleverly inserted the international dialling code in front of the phone number, based on the country chosen. Except there wasn’t the full complement of the world’s countries in the database, and he’d structured the primary keys so we couldn’t add any more. And when you ran reports on the thing, it didn’t include the phone country code because he didn’t realise that you had to dial it to call overseas. He thought everything began with “1” because that was how you dialled to another area in the US. :rolleyes:

19

Usually, I just give up in cases like this. In one recent case, though (there was a country field, but I can’t put in my province…grrrrrr!), it was this really cool lesbian publishing house that I really wanted some Dykes to Watch Out For books from. So I submitted my order anyway, and then sent them a nice little note about why their form should be changed. They were gratifyingly contrite and the form was changed within the day. (The really stupid thing was that the web developer was Canadian… :rolleyes: )

20

You know, sometimes even something as simple as “rue Saint-Whoever ouest” will throw them. If I’m dealing with someone over the phone from an English-speaking area, I usually just give it as “Saint Whoever Street West” for simplicity’s sake. Not strictly accurate, but it’ll get there.

(I was a little surprised to have to spell out “Quebec” for the clerk in Britain the other day, though.)

I really enjoy international addresses that sound interesting. like Soandso, Eggplant Manors, down the hill from the old cemetery, Mailbag Eight, Piffitypuffity Twp., (country), or what have you.