Password specification

[dr_whom]

Have you ever been in a situation where you forget your password to some website or something...

and you try a few options on the login page, but none of them work...

so you click on "forgot my password!" and go through the rigmarole where they send a message to your email or phone or something to confirm your identity...

and you eventually get to the page where you can set a new password...

and on that page it says "Passwords must contain at least one capital letter, one number, and one punctuation mark"...

and you're like, "well, if you'd told me that on the login screen I would have remembered what my password was and not had to go through that whole process"?

Comments

[inthelemonlight.livejournal.com]

This totally happened to me last night.

I keep an email thread with cryptic clues to my own passwords for myself, but when capitals and punctuation become involved, those are only so helpful.

[landofnowhere]

Not quite, but I've had the experience of going through the password-reset process on a website -- the first time I'd done this -- only to be told I can't change my password to a previously used password! Apparently I had the password stored in a place in my brain that was only accessible to me when generating new passwords :-P I then subsequently ended up changing the password on that site several more times before ultimately settling down on a password that was, IIRC, "annoyingpassword" plus obligatory number, symbol, and capitalization.

(It's a website I no longer have any use for -- so I went to log in and change the password just so I could tell this story securely -- but it appears I'd forgot the precise password anyway! So much for that.)

[swan-tower.livejournal.com]

God, yes. And I hate that kind of password setup anyway -- as I understand it, we'd all be much more secure if they just said "your password must be at least 20 characters long" and then we could all type in phrases like "correct horse battery staple" (but not that one, because it's from the xkcd comic that pointed this out to me).

[theevilgenius.livejournal.com]

Yes. My pharmacy insurance website even then had the temerity to lock my account because I tried mutiple times in a row to set a new password using special characters.

[miraclaire.livejournal.com]

All the damn time!