We have exposed the ability for races to take the middle name as a separate field. You can add this option by going to Miscellaneous Settings in the Dashboard as shown on the right. Below is what the form looks like with the Middle Name field.
Personally (Bob Bickel writing), I am not a fan of this. Some people who have been around the race business for years strongly believe in it. All new systems such as Facebook, Google, LinkedIn, etc. have a First Name, Last Name standard since using middle name as an identifier is not scalable. It also introduces another field and can cause confusion for those who are tabbing between fields for data entry. This can cause frustration on the part of users, and potential data quality issues. But our customers overrode my personal objections.
I agree. It’s a pain. And it just cost me 30 minutes figuring out what was changed to break my routines.
I have friends who use their middle name instead of their first name. They simply put it in first name.
I shall NEVER use that field. And now I’ll curse about it.