Using Forgot Password led to problems signing on

[Admin]

Login problems following Forgot Password

In short .

• It should be fixed now.

• If it is still a problem, Contact Jim.

• Avoid in future by keeping your passwords on

  paper somewhere. (Not with banking or any financial passwords).

  Longer for the more technical

  Forums like ours are a cooperative venture.
  We use 4 basic blocks of code from the company in Lynchburg, Virginia who does our hosting.
  We use another 29 blocks of code from people all around the world. Some we pay for. A few are free. (When Jim began using this software 25 years ago it was all free.)
  We also use a separate email manager from a company in Atlanta, Georgia.

  All this has to work together.
  Every year or two there is a new version of the major blocks, and things have to be tweaked to make all the bits work together again.
  That used to be it, but thanks to a large international hacking community, security updates have to happen, sometimes just days apart, and often requiring new tweaks.

  More than once, one of the things to fall foul of these changes has been having the Forgot Password

block work together with other blocks of security code.
Two typical pictures emerge from the logs:

• The first is someone who starts with a Forget

  Password. Perhaps on a new computer, I imagine, or someone whose password is too complex to remember.

• The second is someone who fails to log on three times, is locked out for 15 minutes, but changes the password during that lock time. Perhaps Caps Lock key is down, perhaps a typo.

  The first problem is easily resolved. For sites that involve no money, etc., keep passwords in a small notebook.
  Always using the Shift key, and never the Shift Lock key would perhaps help some for the second problem.

  Password trick

  Sites are happiest with password that have:

•  both upper case and lower case letters;

•  numbers

•  Special characters like @#$%^&*

• No dictionary words
  So, make up your own little string (which you don't write down in your passwords notebook), and add that to every password only as you enter it on a site. Best to make up the string with something you will easily remember. So, say, someone initials (one lower, one upper), some significant year, and your special character.
  So if my mother, Zara Anderson, was married in 1967 I could use zA67$ .

A password in my notebook is michael. But when I type it in, I type michaelzA67$ . Meets the rules for most sites.