On Tue, Apr 15, 2014 at 4:52 AM, Yuvi Panda <yuvipanda(a)gmail.com> wrote: A password strength meter would be awesome, but I think this one is a little weird. Typically,[1] these use a much simpler color scheme, potentially combined with words. An even simpler implementation that would be good for core as well as apps would be clientside validation of the password length. Soon we're going to be upping the limit to six bytes/characters, so a simple "too short" message might be good to get implemented. 1. http://ui-patterns.com/patterns/passwordstrengthmeter -- Steven Walling, Product Manager https://wikimediafoundation.org/ _______________________________________________ Mobile-l mailing list Mobile-l(a)lists.wikimedia.org https://lists.wikimedia.org/mailman/listinfo/mobile-l

My concern with the concept of "password strength" approaches is that it often encourage passwords that are harder to remember (e.g. forcing the user to use caps underscores, etc.). I think it would be better to encourage the use of passphrases instead: An interesting article about making usable and secure passwords<http://www.baekdal.com/insights/password-security-usability>… that password based on sentences with 3 or more words such as *"this is fun"* are ten times more secure than cryptic combinations of numbers and letters such as *"J4fS<2" *(there is also a xkcd version of the same idea <http://xkcd.com/936/>). The shared approach tries to visualise both how strong and whether you typed the correct password (by displaying always the same colours given a specific password). The last part was something similar to what the old Lotus Notes did by displaying different icons of keys next to the password field. That could be slightly useful to anticipate errors but have an impact of initial confusion until the user understands what it is about. Pau On Tue, Apr 15, 2014 at 8:03 PM, Steven Walling &lt;swalling(a)wikimedia.org&gt;wrote;wrote: -- Pau Giner Interaction Designer Wikimedia Foundation _______________________________________________ Mobile-l mailing list Mobile-l(a)lists.wikimedia.org https://lists.wikimedia.org/mailman/listinfo/mobile-l

Purely in reply to Pau's comic: Unfortunately I saw too many password fields with a limit of maximum length. Many are 16 chars and some are even 8 chars. I don't really know their point: passwords are going to be hashed. Why does their original length matter much?