Do you make first and last name required fields in your web applications?

I was wondering if I should make mine mandatory or option开发者_开发技巧al. I'd be more likely to register for a site without having them required, and most sites don't require a full name (or even a first name). The benefit would be to customize the site for the user once they logged in and of course for personalized emails as well.

What's the consensus? Require them? Make them optional and risk having a ton of NULLS in my accounts table?

We use "Full Name" since people may have different cultural structures to their name.

eg: Dr Mark 'The Killer' Von Haiek

This really depends on your business requirements. Unless there is a requirement for a personal email (or phone or whatever - for example for financial transactions etc.) then there still is no real need for storing the info.

Rule of thumb: I would generally only store what you have to store - or even better use something like OpenID.

Hope that helps.

It depends on your needs.

You can actually make the user select an option to display their last name or not.

But, you would only need to require the users on what you actually need. If you don't their names, then you may not ask them to do so.