As if any front end developer came up with this. Anyone who has ever had job in the industry knows this is straight from management.
What should the developer do exactly? Ignore the ticket? Educate the manager who’s perhaps three steps up in the hierarchy and doesn’t even know the person’s name who is charged with implementing the misfeature? Neither would go down well.
Also, the error he got when he tried to put in the password the first time is likely because there's a mismatch between what it claims the password rules are, and what they really are. He might have exceeded the maximum password size (yes, I know they're supposed to be salted in the backend, and maybe then even are, but you still run into this). Or it might be that he used disallowed punctuation (some sites seem to dislike anything other than question marks and the ones over the 1-2-3 keys... I've personally seen the percent sign and ampersand both cause problems.
If there were some little embedded xml file that my password manager could pull from the page automatically that would tell it what the rules are, then I wouldn't have to debug your shitty account creation systems, nameless developer drones out there working for big companies! Not that you care.
FTFY.
Anyway, somebody somewhere about a decade ago seems to have injected into the heads of such rule-makers that users who paste their password confirmations defeat the purpose of the confirmation mechanism, which was leading to excess support requests for forgotten passwords. So, therefore, pasting into the confirmation box (or even better, both boxes) should be disabled.
Never mind that password rules have gotten more complex, that allowing users to temporarily preview their passwords instead is now recommended, or that the use of password managers and online password resets means even if the original concern were valid, it's now moot. The rule exists, and so it must be followed.
At some point these corporations do lurch forward (or die), so eventually this will get changed, but it'll happen way slower than it should.
Prevent that, you stupid website, I dare you!
You can say no but management isn’t under any obligation to capitulate, and often won’t.
More over, it’s often solutioneering as a result to some other management identified issue that devs have pushed back on.
No one's going to risk their job over their boss's inane request to break copy & paste.
Maybe.
This edge is a greatly under-acknowledged and under-represented boundary of propriety, and is routinely flagrantly and hypocritically overrun by organizations with legions of attorneys who fight tooth and nail to stake their claims in the providence of others.
The close cousin is the "click-wrap" agreement, which should be the very first point of engagement for access to any resource that employs it, but is perennially represented as an afterthought which a priori deprives the visitor of recourse from his later exploitation using the form of a "contract" which is fully understood by everyone to not be read, is written in gibberish, and placed at the very end of a primrose path of necessity for access to one's own labors.
A huge warning sign of the intrinsic rentier dynamic of the high technology industry has been built into every PC since the dawn of the era and on prominent display: the "Welcome" screen. You think you are being warmly greeted upon arrival to the cusp of a vibrant commons, but you are actually being told in no uncertain terme that the PC you just bought was pre-appropriated by its software. The purchase price is rent. The device is your property only in the sense that you own the direct costs of its failure and disposal. You are given an account with limited access to its capabilities and being permitted to access it under the auspices of your hosts. Your work is without value to your hosts. The device is a conduit of your continuing consumption, controlled as tightly as possible, which with every step into its labyrinth further reduces, limits and degrades the value of your work to you, and shifts its value to the device purveyors.
This hazard is conventional to the structure of every web service today, including this one: your data (work) goes in and never comes out. It's trapped in the dynamic and context maintained by the host.
No social media architecture today respects your work in context, including this one.
Your comments should belong to you, be hosted by you, and maintained in a mutually shared and beneficial context. But instead your comments go into a black box which you are permitted to review, in exchange for locally issued currency called (tragically) "karma" which is a simply a mechanism for limiting your visibility within a hopelessly regressive and passé format of a reverse-chronologically ordered list of the popular. Everyone on the social web is a serf, tilling a text box, and sharecropping status.
My making an example of HN not to call it out for being egregious. HN is completely ordinary. I'm merely offering an example for how totally indoctrinated the technogentsia is to these dark patterns of social networking architecture and how blind everyone is to them.
It's pretty weird that these dark patterns are so pervasive when you consider that the ideological bent of most computer technologists is "libertarian".
But I should note that California ideology is inherently Randite, and Ayn Rand was a deeply disturbed person.
With transformer AI we have now seen that every human input on the web has specific economic value which is being aggregated and harvested towards the creation and consolidation of enormous kingdoms of social wealth and privilege. This is being done completely without regard for the principles of propriety that software and MSM content publishers have represented through law as being essential to the construction of a commonwealth.
Every output of a transformer is a derivative work without even attribution, much less royalties.
And the AI technologists seem poised to have transformers run interference at every level of "customer" interaction with new architectures.
The more you look into it, the more you will see that high technology has been an epic swindle to transfer control of a commons to narrow silos of exceptional privilege, in which not only does the commonwealth shrivel in exchange for the tech's very limited public advantages, but the vehicle you use for your contributions endlessly deprives you of the just fruits of your own labors, encircles you with infrastructure beyond your reckoning, and enforces your conformance to alien protocols via dark patterns.
Much as automobiles make every destination into a parking lot, so the web browser has made every avenue to knowledge end in a gate which is ever further obfuscated into an opportunity to withhold something of value from the visitor, including the value of your own work in context.
"Welcome."
There was a period in the late-aughts when people wanted to emulate the iPhone's inertial scrolling on the desktop. Most modern sites had it and it was infuriating.
That's probably around the time when this site was built.
> Don't do this to me. I get to copy paste whatever I want whenever I want. When you get your own browser you can do whatever you want but while you are living in my house under my rules I get to copy/paste whenever I goddamn feel like it.
Forcing the user to type the password manually rather than letting them paste something in. I think the original idea was to not allow them to mistype the first one, then paste the typo in the second field. But it's a dated practice and very annoying.
I once worked on a project for a Pharma company and this one guy tried very hard to push his password requirements and no pasting stuff, but luckily we convinced someone with final say that we should just follow the NIST guidelines for password reqs and leave the UX of the password field up to the UX people lol.
I do agree though that smooth scrolling was a front end developer offense, luckily it went out of style pretty quickly.
correct. the other analysis here is wrong. we see similar for payments where user is not allowed to paste in ACH info.
but this isn’t exactly about user error per se. this is about support cost for bad entries. if the user types a wrong password during registration the recovery of such is very hard. the common user (even of a product like fusion) is VERY unsophisticated and will have severe problems recovering. the more advanced user will have plugins that disable paste disabling. the middle skill user (like in the post) will get past it on their own.
so net net this is just another case of this is why we can’t have nice things. they “have to” address that bottom (skill) level of users.
personally i can excuse this. the rest, not so much!