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this post was submitted on 08 Aug 2025
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Cybersecurity
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I keep telling my team this all the time... The push back is always from the support side that says "well users complain that they don't know what's incorrect to fix." and my answer is always "they got their own credentials wrong... it's ALL incorrect. Do it over".
But that's "user hostile".
"WIPE IT CLEAN. This fucking lady's getting a new account."
That's such brain dead reasoning. Only the password should be hidden - if the user can't tell whether their username is correct they need not to be using a computer...
... Well... yes... it is brain dead.
I've had people fail the password reset page... Apparently chrome just autofills whatever it wants and doesn't care about websites that say NOT to autofill a field unless you declare it in some magic way that is non-standard. And our users will get a temporary password in email to let them back into the service to do a proper password reset... They'll fail the reset because chrome autofills their old password and they're too dumb to paste in their temp password from the email. Now the message there is a bit more vague... something like "Please check all inputs. No changes have been made." But I've literally watched users on screenshare complain that "No, I put the password there! See the dots are in the box!".... No... your browser put your old password there because that's what it knows. You need to put the temporary one there... See the words to the right of the field that say "TEMPORARY PASSWORD"? That's where you put it.
The infuriating part is sales and support staff that are on the user's side and make requests to devs to change it... There's reasons that we've only ever had one security event in 22 years... 1) we're lucky... 2) these rules matter.
Users are indeed dumb. Especially the 10-20% of them that hog up 80% of your support staff.
Addendum: Oh! Our users (companies) can create sub-users (workers)! So they can invite others to do stuff on their behalf/in their account. We have support staff ask us constantly to reset those sub-user accounts... Big NO. I don't know that user and can't validate that user. I will not be accidentally granting someone sensitive information to another person's information. You can contact the person who gave you the account access and tell them to reset your information.... make sure you enter the temp password and not your old password in the reset form... otherwise I'll be talking to you again in about 15 minutes.
That's why you use a reset link instead of a temp password.
We do both... The system stores PII... we're not taking any chances.
Auto fill without user intent is infuriating. As is password managers that decide to put an overlayed frame that takes focus away.
As a user, it's infuriating to me. I hate just about anything that changes a webpage after it's initial load and especially anything that takes focus. (I have an extra hate for mobile sites that have a pop-up to join an email list that pulls focus and pops up my phone's keyboard automatically too.
Sometimes the username is not whats expected. Is it the full email or just the first part of the email? Is if something generated by the system? Do you use the system often enough to remember it? Putting a "what's my username link?" Can be helpful
Usernames can be written down or saved in a file for reference if needed. Only passwords really need to be memorized. (Password managers notwithstanding)
I've had it happen to me a few times on my phone that the stupid auto complete would write my email with a space after, and then the even more stupid form would take the space into account.
Took me a while to realise what was going on!
This has been something frustrating about switching to FUTO keyboard recently. Its auto space insertion isn't clever enough not to activate in username/email fields, compared to Gboard. So because many of my logins contain a period, I have to catch and remove all the extraneous spaces now.
Yeah, and it's annoying to type e.g. or i.e. I wish it was smarter.
Input forms can be designed so that an email input doesn't put a space in it. Notice the .com, .org or whatever doesn't do that, it's just when it's in the username portion. Its just lazy programming to not do it.
100% why I wrote "the even more stupid form". Someone isn't sanitizing inputs and it drives me nuts every time.
Idk, I don't think silently removing whitespace in the middle of the text is appropriate (though beginning and end should be stripped), but the form should warm you when there's obviously invalid input.
Silently "correcting" input can be really annoying. For example, my SO's first name has multiple capitals, and some forms "helpfully" split it into two words and the first name gets cut. If I know that, I can spell it without the capitals, but sometimes it doesn't let me know and I need to call in to get it fixed.
Oh I was talking about trimming an email, if it wasn't clear. Spaces are not valid characters so there is really no situation where they should happen. I do agree with you that an explicit message telling the user there is invalid input might be more appropriate, but if you know the correction to apply, I'd still apply it automatically ("hey we noticed you had spaces and we removed them; click here to keep them" or something)
Right, and trim is for the beginning and end. FUTO Keyboard will put spaces after periods, so it'll frequently try to enter something like
first. Last @domain.Com. The casing isn't an issue because emails (and all URLs) should be treated as case insensitive.I wouldn't expect a site to remove all whitespace, only leading and talking trailing whitespace, and then present an error if the email address is obviously invalid. There are libraries for this, and I think a simple regex would also be sufficient to catch most issues (search online for a vetted one).
Spaces are technically allowed before the @, provided you wrap it in quotes. That's incredibly rare and validating that is a bit of a pain, so I'd stick with making it an error instead of silently stripping what could be a valid, but unsupported, email address, since that would cause more confusion than an error.
I didn't know spaces were technically allowed before the @. TIL
Technically, but yeah, it's super rare, and most places don't support it.
Crackers. Why we can't have nice things.