Generate Password - reset to preferred default settings after custom settings?

sbronstein
sbronstein
Community Member

I frequently have to change the password generation settings to meet the requirements of a particular site - no more than 32 characters, only particular special characters, etc etc etc. It would be really nice if 1Password would go back to my preferred default (which is basically the max of everything) the next time I go to generate a password.


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Comments

  • Lars
    Lars
    1Password Alumni

    @sbronstein - 1Password for Mac will leave your settings as you had them most recently (as it sounds like you've discovered). Precisely because password requirements vary from site to site (so there's no "default" maximum), and because we can't know whether you'll need to generate more than one password with the same requirements, or switch to some other set of parameters (and if so, what), or even whether switching to some new set of parameters IS the new "default" you'd like to set, we leave it at whatever you used most recently. Hope this helps. :)

  • sbronstein
    sbronstein
    Community Member

    Yes, I understand how it works today and I am suggesting a change which I believe would make the product better. I am able to use my preferred settings of max chars etc on say 50% of websites. This means that I have to change the settings back around 50% of the time.

    In terms of generating more than one password with the same parameters - 1Password knows what site the user is on, so you could keep the settings the same if the user generates more than one password on that site. (For that matter, you could even store the password requirements for each URL so that when the user goes to generate a new password for that site, the password generator uses the same settings as the previous time.) Or you could just timeout those custom settings after say 5-10 minutes. The probability of two different sites, on which the user is sequentially setting passwords, having the same weird password requirements is pretty much 0.

    Then you say that you "can't know...[if] switching to some new set of parameters IS the new 'default' [I'd] like to set". That is true today, because there is no way to set a default. If there is a button that the user can click to set the current settings as their default, then you will know that they want to change their default to those settings when they click the button.

  • Lars
    Lars
    1Password Alumni

    @sbronstein - thanks for the feedback and the suggestion! We're always looking for ways to improve the user experience, while at the same time keeping it as free from clutter/options/toggles/checkboxes as possible. I don't have anything to share on this, and you chose not to share with us what versions of things (1Password, macOS, extension, browser) you're working with, but there are some changes to the password generator on the horizon in version 7.3, which is currently in beta, which may be of interest to you. If you're on 7.2.5 (which is the current stable release), you can click Preferences > Updates and check the box marked "include beta builds" then run a manual update check, to get the most-recent beta version. If you're not interested in doing that, I don't think it will be too much longer before 7.3 is rolled out to the stable channel. We'd love to hear your feedback. :)

  • sbronstein
    sbronstein
    Community Member

    Sorry I thought I had filled that out - I am running the beta.

    I will grant you that it probably wouldn't be the best idea to add a 'set default' button to that dialog box. :) It is definitely important to keep interfaces as free from clutter as possible.

    Thinking about this a bit further, I wonder how much the current way that it works leads to people using less secure passwords than would be the case if the settings reverted to a more secure default. Say you have a default (that can be changed in preferences somewhere) which is initially set to 64/10/10, and then you add an hour timeout for any custom settings. Would this result in people creating more secure passwords?

    It might be interesting (if you could track via mixpanel or similar) for you to look at what % of users just leave the settings on whatever was last required of them, because they don't think about it, until something new is required of them a few passwords down the line, e.g. site A requires a 15 character max password with no special characters, and then they don't touch the settings for sites B,C,D, E, until site F requires at least one special character....

    Anyway, I kept thinking that this feature had to be arriving in the next version and it kept not arriving, so I figured I should mention that it's a pain point for me. Overall I am a huge fan of 1Password and recommend it to people regularly!

  • Thanks so much for the kind words, and for the feedback on this subject. Hopefully we can continue to iterate on this. :)

    Ben

This discussion has been closed.