Author Topic: More default accounts to group settings  (Read 6913 times)

Offline shreyder

  • Normal Members
  • *
  • Posts: 2
More default accounts to group settings
« on: December 02, 2008, 07:24:18 PM »
Hello Guys,

I love this extension, because it is exactly what I need. I would describe me as a kind of PWM power user. But there's one feature I'd like to have built into PWM, which would make it a lot easier to manager my passwords. It was in some way already presented in this thread. But the discussion there is from 2007. My proposal is similar to waily's there.

My problem is as follows:

Most of the sites I use do not have limitation of password length or characters to use, but some do. The official PWM Tips & Tricks suggests the use of an PWM account for the sites, which need special treatment and currently this is the only solution to get domain based passwords for those sites. But nearly all of those sites share the same settings and so it would be easier for me to collect the settings in one account. This would minimize the size of the RDF file and make it easier to change their settings afterwards.

A solution, which would be - in my opinion - easy to implement, is to have more than one account which behaves like the default account. In a custom account you have to specify the "Using text" field, if you don't do so, PWM will present a error in the "Using Text" field ("[none - click account settings to set]"), instead of using the current URL to generate the "Using Text" argument, as PWM would do when the default account is active.

It seems that this proposal is not easy to understand although it is relative simple, as the discussion between waily and tanstaafl in the above mentioned thread shows. So I want to give an example:

Assume we use the default account for most of all our sites. We use long passwords (15 characters) and special characters (`~!@#$%^&*()_-+={}|[]\:";'<>?,./) in addition to the normal alpha-numeric characters to generate very strong passwords. But some sites, for example html-kit.com, do not accept those special characters. Now we could create a separate account for html-kit.com with the Using Text argument "html-kit.com" and without those special characters. But then we realize that other sites have this restriction too and we have to create other accounts for them. In my proposal, we would just have to create one account for all of those sites with character restrictions and specify somewhere that it should behave like the default account. The URLs tab of this account would exactly look like the one of the default account, so that the "Using Text" argument is created using the Browsers current URL and is not a static argument.

Offline tanstaafl

  • God Member
  • ******
  • Posts: 1363
Re: More default accounts to group settings
« Reply #1 on: December 02, 2008, 10:39:17 PM »
In my proposal, we would just have to create one account for all of those sites with character restrictions and specify somewhere that it should behave like the default account. The URLs tab of this account would exactly look like the one of the default account, so that the "Using Text" argument is created using the Browsers current URL and is not a static argument.

Ok... banged my head against this some more, and realized there is already a Feature Request that encompasses this behavior, although it is much more involved:

New 'Default' and 'Advanced' Security Modes

I'm in a hurry, but if I'm reading your request right, all you are asking for is an option for custom accounts to use the 'Calculated URL' instead of having to specify something in the 'Use the following text...' box.

Well, reading some more on this - since simplifying the GUI is something I have thought a lot about and there have been many threads discussing it - I ran across an old thread discussing simplifying the GUI...

So, go read this thread - especially the last post - and see if it works for you.


Offline shreyder

  • Normal Members
  • *
  • Posts: 2
Re: More default accounts to group settings
« Reply #2 on: December 03, 2008, 02:25:33 PM »
Thank you. I think this is a good solution for me and it will make it a lot easier to manage accounts which just have different "Using Text" arguments and it will - as you pointed out in the FR - improve the GUI.

PasswordMaker Forums

Re: More default accounts to group settings
« Reply #2 on: December 03, 2008, 02:25:33 PM »