My last experience was 10+ years ago, so maybe there has been a drastic revolution, but I once worked on an 'account profile' page for a large, national company (in Germany) and one of the meetings went into this topic - should there be a 'doctor doctor' entry in the dropdown with all the titles someone could choose to be addressed as (so Prof, Dr, etc.). I, the barbaric foreigner, then proposed we just get rid of the field all together - more to fill in, more to get wrong, and who cares anyway? Jeebus, I might as well have kicked a puppy in the nuts right there on the table. How was a letter to Prof. dr. Mustermann ever going to end up in the right mailbox, if they couldn't specify whether it was Prof Dr, Prof dr, Prof or just Dr. Mustermann? These people spend hours coming up with the most ridiculous UI ideas of multiple comboboxes, check list boxes, what have you. So after a few hours I said 'then why don't we just put in a free form text field, so that people can just type whatever they want?'. Well that was the one suggestion I could have made that was even more ridiculous than leaving out the field. What if somebody would type in 'poopyhead' (or whatever the German equivalent is), and they would send a letter to Poopyhead Mustermann, and somebody would take a picture of that letter and send it to the newspaper, mocking the company for doing such idiotic things? (in those days they were more concerned about newspapers than websites).

I don't even remember what they choose in the end. I think just a dropdown box. I probably told them I'm make the list of titles to choose from configurable in their backend system and they could make it however they wanted later - which nobody probably ever bothered to do.