A bit of a day for questions, this one.
We have the situation where somebody on our database has a Lady title (e.g. Lady Smith), so she has no first name (or at least not one that's used in public). I found out that she had a new suffix (she's gone from AM to AC), so I went in to change her record only to find that when I tried to exit out of the record, it wouldn't let me save the changes because she didn't have a first name.
Is there any way to turn that off? After all, there must be a lot of people who come in via newsletters and sign-ups, etc. who put down "Mr Smith" without giving a first name.
We run into a few of these, too, usually via the web as you describe. We usually put the prefix in the fname field, i.e. prefix = null and fname = "Mr." or Lady or whatever, followed by lname.
Not elegant, but at least "Mr. Smith", "Lady Smith", etc. can be entered and appear more or less as desired onscreen and when output. I'd love to hear of a better solution.