Pop quiz: What country is missing in this registration list?
What if I scroll down a bit… Can you pick out the missing country in this part of the list?
We’re looking at a built-in registration field offered in Zoom. When you create a registration page, you can check a box to indicate that you want people to select from a prepopulated list of countries (or geographic regions in some cases). Zoom is kind enough to manage that list so we don’t have to construct a drop-down menu with hundreds of choices.
In the above portions of the list, I was surprised to find “Bahamas” and “Czech Republic” missing as answer choices. But then I glanced at the default selection that Zoom filled in before selecting anything else… “The United States” ???
No, they couldn’t have, could they? Time to scroll down farther:
No, no, no, no!!!!!
This is nothing short of insanity. What happens when the list is displayed on a computer using a different operating system language… Do Spanish speakers see country names preceded by El, La, Los, and Las?
I don’t know when this went into effect. I looked over old registration reports in Zoom and saw that they did not used to include “The” in the country names. I sure hope Zoom realizes the error of its ways and goes back to proper alphabetic ordering based on the primary identifying and distinguishing word in the name. Otherwise I’m going to hack into their developers’ digital music libraries and re-alphabetize their song and artist collections in this fashion.
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