This has been getting up my nose for quite some time. Webmasters and/or webprogrammers that believe it is their duty to ensure my new account password is “secure” / “safe” / “hard to crack”.
- must contain upper case and lower case characters,
- must contain at least one numeric,
- sometimes also a special character,
- sometimes only special characters from a pre-defined set.
Webmaster, please keep your password restrictions to yourself!
For God’s sake, let me pick my password. It is absolutely none of your business, however well-intended!
On top of that, when you then fail to implement your restrictions properly, such as not letting me add special characters of my choosing or you won’t let me add a trailing space, that is just mind-bogglingly stupid!
By all means, do help people choose a good password, but don’t impose your restrictions on people who are quite capable to choosing a good password themselves!
Please.
The Zürich department store Manor just lost a registered customer due to their stupid password restrictions. Their mail order services work really well, but when you are asked to register an account, you are faced with their less-than-clever webdevelopers and their equally dimwit ideas of “safe passwords”.
Manor, please add a button titled “Fuck your stupid password requirements, you have just lost a customer”. Straight feedback for your CIO.