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Comment by greggman3 | Hacker News Reader

After your suggested fix, how does a user enter the first letter of their password in upper case if that's what they want?

Maybe you were expecting the dev to go through all the passwords and fix them so the first letter of all passwords is lower case? Oh but if they were following best practices they don't know the password, they only know its salted hash.

Since the app was already shipping without the first letter being auto-lowercased that would suggest there were plenty of passwords with the first letter already upper cased, also something you can't test for easily if all you have is salted hashes.

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Sorry, it requires more context. The reason this issue wasnt highlighted before was 1/ Many of our users were on laptop and did not use mobile site as much 2/ There was rarely a switch for those who used the mobile site (as in they rarely used desktop, else we would have caught it sooner). The fix was a longer one. We obviously had to have the same convention for a password in desktop and mobile web. For mobile users, after we made a fix, if they had trouble logging in, we asked them to capitalize the first letter of password and try again- when they logged in, we made them change the password and if they could not, they reset it. At the point we found it, we were pushing mobile site to users as an internal growth activity, and we were able to navigate it. It wasnt the best UX to be fair, but we potentially averted a bigger disaster at the time we did it.

PS. Yes, we were hashing the passwords.

Actually the correct fix is correctly flagging the field as a password field, which fixes the capitalisation problem on iOS and Android.

We also had to take care of the few folks who signed up with wrong password(in the sense that they never intended the password to start with a capital letter.). Changing the field value was a part of it - applicable for all new users. The complication was the people who already went through the flow and would have trouble logging in now.

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