Re: [savannah-help-public] Fwd: savannah.gnu.org Verification

[Bob Proulx]

Hi Tom,

Tom Uijldert wrote:
> I finally succeeded in changing it by using a completely different password.
> Apparently I tried to change it with a password that was already used, had
> been used before or similar.

Hmm...  As far as I know there isn't any saving of old passwords and
prevention of reusing them again.  I know that many corporate sites do
that type of thing.  But as far as I know there isn't that restriction
on the Savannah systems.  And actually I would oppose that type of
restriction if it is implemented there.

> What initially threw me off track was the incredibly cryptic "Error: missing
> parameters".

That sounds like some type of internal error that is being propagated
out to the user.  I don't think it is an intentional error message
being delivered to you.  From the message I am thinking that when the
PHP code is passing the information to the 'pwqcheck' program for
checking that something unexpected is going wrong there.

> That does not really indicate that there's something wrong with the
> password, I associated it more with a bug at the backend.

Agreed.

> Couple that with a rather cryptic help text of what is exactly checked about
> the new password and the confusion is complete.

Agreed! :-(

> FWIW, these may be 2 suggestions to improve the user-friendliness of that
> page somewhat.
> 
> Hope this helps,

Yes.  Thank you for the details.  It helps a lot.

The web interface has a shortage of volunteers working on it.  One of
the problems is that it is not trivial to set up a test instance of
it.  Assaf has been working to make that easier.  But I haven't done
so for myself yet.  Which means that I personally don't have an easy
way to test problems in the web interface out.  I need to find some
time to work through setting up a test instance so that I can debug
problems like the one you are reporting.

Bob