Blog Post

Changing Your PASS Credentials

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I got an email today from PASS, noting that credentials were changing from username to email. That’s fine. I don’t really care, but I know I got multiple emails to different accounts, so which account is associated with which email?

I clicked the “login details” link in the email and got this:

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Not terribly helpful, but I was at least logged in. If I click my name, I see this:

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Some info, including the email, which I’m not sure is linked to the email I clicked on, or is based on browser cookies. However, there’s no username here.

If I click the edit profile link, I get more info, but again, no username. No way to tie back anything I’ve done in the past to this account.

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I have always used a username to log into the SQLSaturday site, so I went there. On this PASS property, I’ve got my username.

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If I click the username, I go back to the PASS site, to the MySQLSaturday section, but again, no link to this username. However I realize now which email is related to which username.

Hopefully the others will go dormant soon and I won’t get multiple announcements, connectors, ballots, etc.

The point here isn’t to pick on PASS as much as it is to point out some poor software and communication preferences. Changing to email from username (or vice versa) can be a disruptive change. I’d expect the email would include some information on username and email relation, or at least username since it was sent to a specific email. That would allow me to determine where I might need to contact PASS to update things, or which username was affected for me.

I’d also expect that the username to be stored somewhere and visible on the site. Even if this isn’t valid login information, why not just show it? When we migrated SQLServerCentral from one platform to another, we kept some columns in the database that showed legacy information. This information wasn’t really used, but it did help track down a few problems we had with the migration. Having a bit of data is nice, and it doesn’t cost much (at least in most cases).

This wasn’t a smooth process, though not too broken for me. I like that PASS sent the communication, and I’m glad the old method still works. I logged in with username today. I wish there was a bit more consistency between PASS applications, and that they included a date when username will no longer work. I also hope they update their testing (or test plan) with any issues they discover this week, so the problems aren’t repeated.

Filed under: Blog Tagged: PASS, secruity, syndicated

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