My suggestion would be as follows. In the here and now FOLLOW the Rules, stop trying to rewrite them to give special handling to Asian culture or ANY other cultuture, should someone start conmplaining because their culture reads right to left, therefore yielding different results. Use the CA system to achieve the cultural representation. What you seem to fail to understand, is that you arre basically wanting to trash the rules, just because of culture. I am examining your two software updates to see which one i think might be the most effective, but that doesn't help us NOW. I would also appreciate if you would stop with your accusations, of "I don't understand" or implying some other form o disrespect. I have explained this carefully, I am FULLY aware of the various cultural issues, and when I designed the Rules format I DELIBERATELY ignored them in order to keep the Rules SIMPLE, the culture became simply the culture of the screen if you will. The data displayed as it is ON the Screen. Reason, you cannot write SIMPLE Rules if you start accounting for the variety of cultures that are possible. Hebrew characters are special characters and read right to left, most if not all Asian characters are handled vertically, in reality I am not sure a program could be developed that could handle all of the possibilities. I don't even think Microsoft tries to do that, they ask which language you want to function in, and that will determine your data display.

The solution to this in the short run seems obvious and simple based on Ken's prior comments and based on the design. Now let me go analyze your two program changes.   I'll let you know what i think.

Skip

I am still looking at Option 4, Option 2 with your update violates the rules plain and simple. Here is something for you to keep in mind. And this is where I think you are confusing things, I deal with contributions, which is what the Rules are all about, that data must be handled in a consistent manner. You talk about checkboxes/switches affects what...not the Online, they are local choices. I am not sure that they resolve much of anything for you. They might make life slightly easier but your LOCAL preference would be Yun-Fat Chow, while the Online is going to be Chow Yun-Fat (most of the time), you NOW can make the necessary change to reflect your preference upon download, with your checkbox/switch you would still have to go in and check the box to get the display as you want it, so I am not sure how much would be gained, a slight reduction in time, checkbox versus editing, perhaps. Obviously, i think it would have to be a choice you would have to make each time as there would be no way for the program to be able to identify an Asian name. Computers aren't THAT smart...yet.

Perhaps that is the crux of the case, confusing Online data with local data.<shrugs>

Skip

Well, the number of counts will always be a problem if the actors appear in Asia- and US-Movies. So their most used ("common") name would only depend on the number of released movies from each continent. Couldn't read all of your posts, but as our database simply says "First Name" and "Last Name" and they are credited in the Asia-Movies "Last Name" "First Name", the name remains the same, only the order it is written.

So even if the credits are ""Last Name" "First Name", the common name remains the same... am I wrong?