The other day I went to a major pizza chain's website to order online. I had to create an account first, of course.
No big deal.
As I was choosing my password, I was pleased to see a password strength indicator to the right. Excellent,
it's telling my password is "too short" -- let me add some more characters. "Warning: Too Simple" it said.
Great - now I'll add some numbers in there. My password strength was now "good," but since they were going
to be storing my personal details, I wanted a "great" password. I like to throw characters in there that
aren't letters or numbers, so I did. And it told me my password strength was "great."
Even better that they gave a color indication as well - going from red to green as my password got
sufficiently strong.
You can imagine my disappointment when I hit the "Go" button, only to be presented with this message:
Please enter a valid password. Valid passwords must be at least 8 characters in length and contain letters and numbers only.
Look, I understand the allure of arbitrarily limiting these things. You secretly
want someone to put in those special characters just so they can
see how good you were to have the foresight that someone might try to use one.
When I first started programming for money I did the same thing. Even though we were on a modern OS with
very few limitations on filenames, I wrote the application such that it would enforce MS DOS filename restrictions,
and only allowed letters and numbers. I spent
extra effort to make sure the application would
fail
on completely valid input.
As a consequence, strange bugs pop up because that app is not the only interface, and the system is less usable for the customer.
I know most of you in this audience already know you shouldn't design "features" like this. But for the
newbies that haven't yet had enough experience to know:
If you don't have a valid reason for
constraining the data, don't do it just to show off what you can do.
It's an annoyance at best. It adds complexity where none is needed,
making your application harder to maintain over time. At worst, it results in defects that your customer
paid you to insert into the application. And that's a tragedy of ethics.
Hey! Why don't you make your life easier and subscribe to the full post
or short blurb RSS feed? I'm so confident you'll love my smelly pasta plate
wisdom that I'm offering a no-strings-attached, lifetime money back guarantee!
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