Agreed. I was asking for the recommended way to represent a 10-digit number within MLS in the US. Europe and other areas are free to do what they want. I'm not even asking for a mask necessarily (although I think that would solve the problem), just the best recommendation to make to our STS for how we want OUR Stake to conform. IMO, it comes down to two possible formats:Alan_Brown wrote:Yes, using periods to separate phone number components is common in Europe, and other countries. But it looks a bit odd to many people in the US, so I don't see any reason to adopt a European standard for a stake in the US. The audience that will see the numbers is 99.9% inside the stake, so my opinion is that it's best to use a standard your audience is most familiar with.
The (800) 555-1212 format offers tradition and (strictly IMO) aesthetics. Negatives are it's more cumbersome to enter, some clerks will add a space after the last parenthesis while others may leave it off, takes up more room on reports, unconfirmed reports of problems with NFS.
The 800-555-1212 offers a more simplistic, compact approach. It's a bit easier to enter and easier to maintain "format consistency" among all the clerks in the Stake.
Looks like plan B for my recommendation. Y'all are free to choose for yourselves or come up with something entirely different. Like Alan said, only on rare occasion will these ever be used outside the Stake. 3rd party software that uses exported MLS data will just have to deal with anything we throw at them.