Alphabetize by last name?

[Hejman]

I saw that one of my old games, Trade Bait! (MLB Edition) was trending today and went back to retake it and see how well I could do now that I had forgotten all the answers.  (And, simultaneously, was reminded that I meant to make more of these for other sports and should probably actually do that now.)  In taking it, it hit me that I often immediately knew the answer and then went to look for it expecting it to be alphabetized by last name, only to have to remind myself that it was done by first name and search all over again.  I realize that I could simply have put the names in that way (McGwire, Mark) but that would have looked very weird.  I could also have put in just last names, but there are a lot of MLB players with some of these common names and so that wouldn't have worked either.

So my question is this: If there was an option to alphabetize by last name (basically, by the first letter of the last word in the answer), would there be any regular use for it, or is this quiz an outlier in that department?

[JoeBeta]

"outlier" is a cool word. Thanks. Oh, the question ... I think it would be super-confusing. Ken Griffey Jr. - would be alphabetized by Jr. Lady Gaga would be alphabetized by Gaga. Personally I am happy with first name alphabetization. "McGwire, Mark" doesn't look weird to me.... except, of course, that "w" looks pretty weird.

[iglew]

A narrow function just for alphabetize by last name would be awkward to implement since Sporcle would not always be able to tell from the text string what is the last name.

What I think would be quite useful is a more generalized alphabetization function with full control.  For example, there could be a checkbox that says "characters within { } do not count for alphabetization".  And/or "characters within [ ] count for alphabetization but do not print".

In the meantime, there is an effective kludge where you put strings of non-printing spaces in front of each answer to make them alphabetize how you like.  Someone else explained it somewhere on the forum once.

[geshmonkey]

^ That was pretty much what I was gonna say, but if there was a way to alphabetise by last name, you could always use the non-printing spaces like:

Ken Griffey{sp}Jr.

Lady{sp}Gaga

...to break the 'last word alphabetising' system.

But it's probably easier to alphabetise yourself [just sort it out in Excel, let the function do it for you, and import].