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Comment by pg | Hacker News Reader

It isn't that common. If it becomes more common I'll write something for it.

How do you know whether it's common or not? I've sat there several times trying to remember my password, remember whether I used Clickpass or not, etc. Finally, I just decide it's not worth commenting, and close the browser tab. (Posting under newly created account because I still can't figure out my old account's password.)

We log failed login attempts.

someone doing a few failed logins before successfully logging in won't look all that different than someone doing a few failed logins and then giving up, which is what most humans would do (as opposed to scripts).

people naturally tend to have a small number of cross products of usernames and passwords...once it gets too large we start forgetting parts of it.

a couple times in the past year i've forgotten my password for hn. after the first time it happened i wrote it down so i wouldn't lose my precious karma.

Password retrieval has been a standard feature for any website for many years. It's easy to do for users who have an email in their profile, and it gives the rest a good reason to enter it. When I created my account I added my email because I assumed that the feature existed. Good thing I haven't forgotten my password.

How many accounts are inactive and with the last few logins failed?

I am in exactly the same position - I abandoned an old account since there was no way to do this.

I also reregistred because I forgot the password of my old account

same here. 2nd account.

also reregistered

also registered twice

Why do you think my username is nopassrecover.

pg, can you personally help this fellow out? Its such as a rare occurrence, like you said, and its always good to be able to retrieve your account. I lost at least 2 accounts on Digg over the years(before I stopped using it) and was never able to retrieve them.

http://www.memorise.org/

I did. In fact that is the default solution: when someone forgets their password they email me and I reset it for them (if they put their email addr in their profile).

About 3 weeks ago, I got so irritated with trying to log in from time to time that I sat down for about an hour and tested every fat-finger combination of the password I used that I could think of. I took me about 40 tries, but I finally found that I'd hit a letter twice (somehow in both fields!). I really wanted to keep everything under my account, so I wasn't going to just make a new account, but it frustrated me to no end that I couldn't just reset my password and move on. Since finding my password, I've changed it to something else, but also added an openid account, so on the rare chance this happens again, hopefully I won't be left out in the cold.

or just write it down...i mean, if someone gets access to your harddrive, stealing your hn account is probably the least of your worries.

It's happened to me. I had to jump through hoops to get it back (a browser had it stored, so I set the browser to use a proxy, then had the proxy spit out the form including my password)

Much simpler solution: https://www.squarefree.com/bookmarklets/forms.html#view_pass...

I'm curious how you know its not common. I know there are multiple posts on the suggestion board about it, including my own. (Work browser had login credentials cached, but I couldn't figure out what I used to log in at home. I think I finally just used work browser to set a password, cuz I couldn't remember which OpenID I used.)

Yes, it's happened to me too. Mostly because I thought I'd signed in with clickpass, which I had, but had also created a password. It did come to me finally, or I'd be stuck using HN from the same machine.

on an unrelated issue, is it possible to merge the posts (and karma) of one account into another one?

i've also noticed problems such as submissions and comments not going thru, though it has nothing to do with password problem but still...

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