Submission + - Why are webmasters stupid about foreign addresses?
EWAdams writes: I don't know how many websites I've tried to register on that assume that I live in America. They demand that I pick a state from one of the 50 listed, and provide no alternative if I live elsewhere. They demand that I enter a ZIP code in exactly five digits, no letters allowed. (Canada and the UK use letters in their postal codes. Ireland does not use postal codes at all — the entire population of Ireland is less than that of New York city, so why bother?)
They demand that I enter a phone number in the form XXX-XXX-XXXX and no other. Sometimes they do this even when they provide a field to indicate that the country I live in is not the USA. The international standard format for a phone number is +[country code]-[city code]-[local number]. There are no guarantees about how long any of those will be in any given country.
What's this about? Are webmasters just routinely narrow-minded, blinkered, pig-ignorant morons, or is there some vast American conspiracy to pretend that it's the American Web rather than the World Wide Web? I'm not just talking about mom-and-pop operations here; some of the worst offenders are multinationals! I'm usually forced to resort to the telephone to straighten it out — a waste of their time, my time, and my money. What can be done about it? How does one get the message through to the idiot who programmed, and maintains, the site?
They demand that I enter a phone number in the form XXX-XXX-XXXX and no other. Sometimes they do this even when they provide a field to indicate that the country I live in is not the USA. The international standard format for a phone number is +[country code]-[city code]-[local number]. There are no guarantees about how long any of those will be in any given country.
What's this about? Are webmasters just routinely narrow-minded, blinkered, pig-ignorant morons, or is there some vast American conspiracy to pretend that it's the American Web rather than the World Wide Web? I'm not just talking about mom-and-pop operations here; some of the worst offenders are multinationals! I'm usually forced to resort to the telephone to straighten it out — a waste of their time, my time, and my money. What can be done about it? How does one get the message through to the idiot who programmed, and maintains, the site?
