Few things in online computing have been as problematic as passwords. One of the bigger issues is when you've forgotten your password (and it especially doesn't help when you have to change it every 90 days or whatever) and so press the "Forgot your password?" button on the website.
Quite often this engages various impossible hurdles, such as answering some key questions like "What High School Did you Attend" as there are 100 different ways to name a pariticular high school from memory: was the middle initial included or spelled out, etc, or who was your first boss (was that after high school (can't remember that one fortunately), after college, in college, then do you count the student research grant supervisor, or likewise how to spell out his or her name, and so on.
Or guess at some letters buried in a pile of doodles.
Yeah all these impossible things. Then you may not remember which email address you used (some forwarding to others), so you might have to try several, possibly going back through all the hurdles again. Often they won't tell you if your email was recognized or not, you have to wait 10 minutes or so (or more if your email is flakey) to see whether you get the email, or have to try another. Then, what happens when you do finally get the email (or if, actually, the email password reset has not worked in years...as was true for my Credit Union).
I've always found the more the institution is a big bank, the less password grief they give you. Big banks can cover a few losses, they can use more sophisticated or expensive additional security measures, and they see the greater loss from subjecting people to crap and possibly losing their customers and failing to become the #1 bank.
Everyone else, the less money they make the harder for them to handle risks, and some more than others become password paranoid with all the crap: very long passwords, possibly double passwords, that you have to TYPE in (not paste), and they pre-select for you frequently, plus the kinds of hurdles I described above.
Actually I found the eBay process recently sufficiently easy to get through. (They handle a lot of money, after all.) There was just one problem.
They gave me a link to open my account. Nice, but then when I went to change my password, it still asked for my old password first, and didn't accept the activiation code used to open my account.
It's amazing how many bugs could so easily be found by merely trying to use the program.
Quite often this engages various impossible hurdles, such as answering some key questions like "What High School Did you Attend" as there are 100 different ways to name a pariticular high school from memory: was the middle initial included or spelled out, etc, or who was your first boss (was that after high school (can't remember that one fortunately), after college, in college, then do you count the student research grant supervisor, or likewise how to spell out his or her name, and so on.
Or guess at some letters buried in a pile of doodles.
Yeah all these impossible things. Then you may not remember which email address you used (some forwarding to others), so you might have to try several, possibly going back through all the hurdles again. Often they won't tell you if your email was recognized or not, you have to wait 10 minutes or so (or more if your email is flakey) to see whether you get the email, or have to try another. Then, what happens when you do finally get the email (or if, actually, the email password reset has not worked in years...as was true for my Credit Union).
I've always found the more the institution is a big bank, the less password grief they give you. Big banks can cover a few losses, they can use more sophisticated or expensive additional security measures, and they see the greater loss from subjecting people to crap and possibly losing their customers and failing to become the #1 bank.
Everyone else, the less money they make the harder for them to handle risks, and some more than others become password paranoid with all the crap: very long passwords, possibly double passwords, that you have to TYPE in (not paste), and they pre-select for you frequently, plus the kinds of hurdles I described above.
Actually I found the eBay process recently sufficiently easy to get through. (They handle a lot of money, after all.) There was just one problem.
They gave me a link to open my account. Nice, but then when I went to change my password, it still asked for my old password first, and didn't accept the activiation code used to open my account.
It's amazing how many bugs could so easily be found by merely trying to use the program.
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