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Re:Confirmshaming by jameshart on Tuesday June 07, 2016 @03:04PM (#11856891)
It's often just a reflexive behavior on a website. Fields which have to be displayed back to the user naturally tend to have reasonable restrictions on what characters they can contain (no linebreaks is a common one, for example). The fact that passwords will never be displayed back to anybody (ideally) is no deterrent to your typical business analyst writing a hundred page spec for the account management pages, and just like every other field on the site they will place some arbitrary length restriction on the field, and pronounce that certain special characters are off limits. Programmers will then implement the restrictions because hey, it's an easy two points.

There are, actually, a couple of reasonable UX reasons for placing some restrictions on the characters someone can use in a password. If you hope that they will be able to enter the same password from another device later, you want to encourage them not to exploit all the wonderful input possibilities afforded by their plug-in emoji keyboard on their phone. Sadly I don't think this kind of reason underlies any restrictions I've ever seen in the wild.

Re:Confirmshaming by tamana on Tuesday June 07, 2016 @03:23PM (#11857037)
Password has to be compatible with phone input -- legacy 0-9 phone, not mobile computing devices.
Re:Confirmshaming by shivsta on Tuesday June 07, 2016 @05:20PM (#11857956)
Why would this need to be restricted to A-z 0-9? Isn't it safe to assume that nobody will be typing in passwords from their land line?