- Development - lists.drupal.org

Re: [drupal-devel] Admin Help writing instructions - 60 patches coming soon
by Kobus Myburgh 17 May '05

17 May '05

>> And here I just translated Drupal to Afrikaans and now all the help >> texts get updated. Bah! This will be a good time to figure out how >> to MAINTAIN an update. I have only started from scratch. > You can merge your translations against POT files from a later version > and msgmerge will try to fit good matches to the new strings from the > old ones. A brief search for "msgmerge" got about 10000 results, and when refining this, I finally heard of one for Windows, but it is part of the Cygwin package. Isn't there a stand-alone Windows port of msgmerge that anyone know of? Once I get it, I will >> I also have questions with regards to translating contributed >> modules. Where do we put them? Are these translations sent to the >> module developers directly? > They are put into a /po subdirectory. You need to create a POT file > first using the phpextractor script. Mail me if you want one for > specific contrib modules. I don't have CVS access, and I won't get it, so I can translate it, but can't put it in the /po subdirectory. I will play around with the extractor, so that I can do this myself, because I need to learn somehow, sometime :) Maybe I should invest a bit of time in getting myself a Linux machine. I have installed Linux once, but that is the same as saying I have installed Windows. Heh... Any fool can install it, but can any fool install it (and set it up) RIGHT? I have only translated Core, but another South African, Tiaan, has translated several modules. Since I can't upload it, can we do it again as we did the previous time with my translations, Gerhard? I will upload one zip file with all the translations. Regards, Kobus

3 2

Re: [drupal-devel] Admin Help writing instructions - 60 patches coming soon
by Kobus Myburgh 17 May '05

17 May '05

> IMO that would be more than enough power.I have not seen much po files that > actually had all the help translated, but then again, its been awhile since i > checked them all ;) YUP, been a while since you checked ;) All texts that poEdit showed in my files were translated! And here I just translated Drupal to Afrikaans and now all the help texts get updated. Bah! This will be a good time to figure out how to MAINTAIN an update. I have only started from scratch. I also have questions with regards to translating contributed modules. Where do we put them? Are these translations sent to the module developers directly? Regards, Kobus

2 1

Re: [drupal-devel] Docking Boxes.
by Kobus Myburgh 17 May '05

17 May '05

> I would like some more peoples ideas on this. Should we consider to include > this API in drupal for our javascript needs, rather then creating our own? Oh, absolutely. I have included JavaScript menus in several Drupal sites I have constructed. Since Drupal prefers not to have JavaScript (AFAIK), maybe just inot include it with core, or if it is included, have it disabled by default? Kobus

7 10

[drupal-devel] [bug] file_check_location problems
by chx 17 May '05

17 May '05

Issue status update for http://drupal.org/node/23028 Project: Drupal Version: cvs Component: file system Category: bug reports Priority: critical Assigned to: chx Reported by: chx Updated by: chx Status: patch Attachment: http://drupal.org/files/issues/file_check_location.patch (2.34 KB) Loosely based on walkah's idea I have changed a bit file_check_location. Most of the problems related to file_check_upload is gone now but still we have one: the system temporary directory. Please really look at the patch and let's decide whether file_check_upload is really necessary for $directory_temp or not. chx

2 1

[drupal-devel] [feature] Do not display "Active/New forum topic" if no topics at all
by Cvbge 16 May '05

16 May '05

Issue status update for http://drupal.org/node/23014 Project: Drupal Version: cvs Component: forum.module Category: feature requests Priority: normal Assigned to: Anonymous Reported by: Cvbge Updated by: Cvbge Status: patch When there are no topics at all blocks are still displayed, although empty. Attached patch makes empty forum blocks not to be displayed (the same behaviour has e.g. comment's "Recent comments"). This also works with taxonomy_access module, when some roles do not have access to all forums/topics - there are forums/topics, but those people see only empty block. With this patch the don't see the block at all. Grr. I'll attach patches for 4.6.0 and cvs when the uploading issue is fixed. Cvbge

1 2

[drupal-devel] [bug] Do not execute functions in include files
by chx 16 May '05

16 May '05

Issue status update for http://drupal.org/node/18213 Project: Drupal Version: cvs Component: base system Category: bug reports Priority: normal Assigned to: chx Reported by: killes(a)www.drop.org Updated by: chx Status: patch Attachment: http://drupal.org/files/issues/bootstrap_3.patch (12.36 KB) chx Previous comments: ------------------------------------------------------------------------ March 2, 2005 - 00:09 : killes(a)www.drop.org Drupal currently executes functions in include files. This is very annoying if you want to include files from external scripts such as update scripts or other scripts that want to use Drupal as a framework. Offending files are: database.inc: db_set_active(); session.inc: session_set_save_handler("sess_open", "sess_close", "sess_read", "sess_write", "sess_destroy", "sess_gc"); session_start(); common.inc: A bunch of stuff at the bottom. All this should be moved into a start.inc file. ------------------------------------------------------------------------ March 27, 2005 - 08:44 : adrian I haven't done this recently, but back in 4.4 era I attempted something similar to this for the install api. A _lot_ of modifications were required to be able to use (for instance) the theme api without needing to have a database connection active. ------------------------------------------------------------------------ March 27, 2005 - 08:55 : adrian It's definately not a simple problem. For instance.. the db connection needs to be started during bootstrap, and during normal execution. I think the better idea is to include a DRUPAL_INIT constant we can check before executing the function. (or a DRUPAL_NO_INIT .. i'm not picky). ------------------------------------------------------------------------ April 28, 2005 - 23:53 : killes(a)www.drop.org Here's an old patch by me that illustrates what I want to do. http://lists.drupal.org/archives/drupal-devel/2005-03/txtq23pAcHATw.txt Instead of putting the stuff into index.php, alternative file names need to be found. ------------------------------------------------------------------------ May 4, 2005 - 19:36 : chx Attachment: http://drupal.org/files/issues/boot.patch (6.83 KB) Well, I have written something to address the issue. Now you can include everything to your hearts content just include init.inc as well and do an appropriate drupal_bootstrap. Alas, ATM database and bootstrap is very interwined. This interdependency could be obliterated if we'd not use variable_get('dev_query') in database.*.inc. cvs diff -u -N -F^f against cvs.drupal.org as CVSROOT failed to include to include the two new files, so I'll include them as followups. ------------------------------------------------------------------------ May 4, 2005 - 19:37 : chx Attachment: http://drupal.org/files/issues/boot_0.patch (10.31 KB) Hm, settings.php changes were ommited. ------------------------------------------------------------------------ May 4, 2005 - 19:37 : chx Attachment: http://drupal.org/files/issues/init.inc (3.46 KB) ------------------------------------------------------------------------ May 4, 2005 - 19:38 : chx Attachment: http://drupal.org/files/issues/settings_ini_set.php (850 bytes) ------------------------------------------------------------------------ May 4, 2005 - 19:44 : chx Attachment: http://drupal.org/files/issues/boot_1.patch (14.49 KB) Following advice from darix I have now created one patch. Still, I'd like to know how could I do this with cvs. ------------------------------------------------------------------------ May 4, 2005 - 20:01 : chx Attachment: http://drupal.org/files/issues/boot_2.patch (14.48 KB) Steef found that I had $$ in settings.php. He also asked what's this good for. Several things, but most advantages come when you use only parts of Drupal. If you want use, say, only our forms functions then now you can include('common.inc'); without side effects. If you need the database layer, you do a include('init.inc') and call drupal_bootstrap('database') ------------------------------------------------------------------------ May 5, 2005 - 23:03 : chx Attachment: http://drupal.org/files/issues/boot_3.patch (17.98 KB) The database layer is now totally independent of other parts of Drupal. ------------------------------------------------------------------------ May 15, 2005 - 21:37 : chx A very stupid bug related to variable init is fixed and I am sync'd to HEAD, so timer_init('page') is called.

1 0

[drupal-devel] [feature] Trim username at login
by Cvbge 16 May '05

16 May '05

Issue status update for http://drupal.org/node/11791 Project: Drupal Version: 4.6.0 Component: user.module Category: feature requests Priority: normal Assigned to: Anonymous Reported by: kps Updated by: Cvbge Status: patch ok. I revoke my -1 for trimmed passwords. Go ahead and trim them. I think there is no need to notify users about trimmed passwords or reject passwords with leading/trailing whitespaces. But still, attached patch is lacking support for existing passwords with such whitespaces. This can be accomplished for example by also checking not-trimmed version if trimmed version fails. Cvbge Previous comments: ------------------------------------------------------------------------ October 20, 2004 - 19:29 : kps They create an account. They get a password by email. They select the password plus the preceding blank or following newline. They paste it into the 'Password' box. They can't log in. They write to me complaining. I get tired of complaints and patch user.module to strip leading and trailing blanks. ------------------------------------------------------------------------ October 20, 2004 - 19:39 : kps Attachment: http://drupal.org/files/issues/user.module_0.patch (766 bytes) I claim I'm not *really* dumber myself. Drupal timed out on me.... ------------------------------------------------------------------------ October 20, 2004 - 20:02 : moshe weitzman makes sense to me ------------------------------------------------------------------------ October 20, 2004 - 23:54 : rkendall +1 FWIW - I could see this being useful, and don't really see any practical drawbacks. I does smell of hack, but is that really an issue? I mean, it might not be the 'done' thing to mess with passwords, however, I can't imagine any regular user intentionally putting leading or trailing whitespace on a password, but I can imagine it being done accidentally fairly often (either when setting a password, or when logging in). To be consistent, it would make sense to trim passwords when setting them as well. ------------------------------------------------------------------------ October 21, 2004 - 01:09 : Bèr Kessels -1 from me. I think we should nstart meddling with passwords by trim()ing them. If you have dumb users, you should fix it in the mail that is send to them. That is really easy. For example: add a word after the passwords: your password is WKDKAFAJ34 please mind capital letters. or so. Bèr ------------------------------------------------------------------------ October 21, 2004 - 01:36 : Steven I don't agree with Bèr... copy/pasting is a fiddly business, especially because when pasting a password all you see is asterisks and you don't notice if there is an extra character. Trimming the password won't hurt, I very much doubt that there are people who consciously use a space at the beginning or end of their password. +1 on trimming, it is a usability improvement. ------------------------------------------------------------------------ October 21, 2004 - 01:51 : chx +1 here. Bèr, if you write a sentence around it, you can still copy-paste the whitespace before and after it. ------------------------------------------------------------------------ October 21, 2004 - 03:18 : Uwe Hermann I'm unsure if I really like this, but if this really gets applied, please make it a configuration option. Do not hardcode it for all Drupal installations. Thanks, Uwe. ------------------------------------------------------------------------ October 21, 2004 - 07:06 : robertDouglass +1 I can confirm from my logs that the typical user bungles initial login 1-4 times, with each bungled attempt making an all-out failure more likely. Not only am I in favor of trimming, I am much in favor of investigating other means of initial password assignment like on the initial register form or by generating a unique URL that gets mailed and only has to be clicked or pasted into the browser address bar. Sorry if those alternatives have already been widely discussed here. ------------------------------------------------------------------------ October 21, 2004 - 08:21 : stefan nagtegaal I am all for trimming the spaces in front of the username and after it, but I am absoklutely against another option for such thing. IMO this is only a usability improvement and it is not needed to make it a configurable behaviour.. We have enough options already, and if you'll ask me I'll tell you that we need less options instead of more.. ------------------------------------------------------------------------ October 21, 2004 - 11:58 : Bèr Kessels Admitted: no one will conciously add spaces to his or her passwords. So i will pull out my -1 hereby. but -1 for making ot an option. As steef syis: its useability. I still stick to the -1 for applying this specific patch. I beleive that we should be 1) consitant, and strip /all/ password whitespace. 2) use drupal_set_message() to warn people when whitespace was stripped. And so to educate users to be aware of whitespace when copying passwords. ------------------------------------------------------------------------ October 21, 2004 - 13:39 : kps My proposed patch also strips white space when the user changes the password, so it's not possible to create an unusable password. I agree that a warning message would be a good idea. ------------------------------------------------------------------------ October 21, 2004 - 18:10 : Chris Johnson Part of the problem with users copying and pasting extraneous whitespace around passwords (or userrnames) is the inconsistent behavior in GUI windowing environments. That is to say, in some applications in some GUIs, double-clicking on a word will copy the word and its surrounding white space, for example. In others, it will not. One might think it would be visibly obvious that the surrounding white space was included in the copy operation, but that's not so. The words might be displayed in a very small, proportional font (and further might be justified or kerned in unpredictable fashion) which make it hard to see just where the highlighted copied text begins and ends. This is under the control of the application and the user. Or, the user might think logically that since all he or she wanted was the word, and likewise that "whitespace" is irrelevant, the user may assume that what was copied was only the desired word even if they can visibly see that the adjacent spaces are highlighted. I'm well aware of this behavior myself and even I sometimes get tripped up when copying and pasting bits of data here and there by the occasional undesired white space. My vote would be to always trim leading and trailing white space, and to document in the help that such white space is not valid in passwords. ------------------------------------------------------------------------ March 13, 2005 - 20:25 : killes(a)www.drop.org The patch still applies. Apart from Ber everybody liked it. I also like it. ------------------------------------------------------------------------ March 14, 2005 - 15:42 : Bèr Kessels "apart from Ber everyone liked it", so here a short comment: I still beleive modifying what a user inserts should never be modified. But the current situation is far worse, so I guess it *gets a +1* from me now too :). ------------------------------------------------------------------------ March 15, 2005 - 20:03 : tangent RE #11, if whitespace is not checked for in the password validation it should be. Preventing whitespace from being used is preferable to simply stripping it. ------------------------------------------------------------------------ April 29, 2005 - 21:18 : kps Attachment: http://drupal.org/files/issues/password-trim.patch (951 bytes) Patch against 4.6 attached. ------------------------------------------------------------------------ May 15, 2005 - 23:06 : jakeg I am +10 for this... but so far have leading/trailing spaces been allowed in passwords? If they have, then this causes an obvious problem - users with existing leading/trailing spaces in their passwords will no longer be able to login. You can't pull the password hash out of the database and trim that... that's not how hashes work. If leading/trailing spaces *have* been allowed in the past, then the obvious work around would be: if someone tries to login and enters a leading/trailing space and the login fails, ask them whether their password has one. If it does, get them to reset their password then choose a new one. Of course you also have to ensure that when users setup new passwords/edit their passwords the password hash is made from a trimmed version of their password. You don't have to inform them that its been trimmed. Its irrelevant to them. You just do it. ------------------------------------------------------------------------ May 16, 2005 - 11:51 : Bèr Kessels Please note that chaging the title, affects the whole issue. ------------------------------------------------------------------------ May 16, 2005 - 14:43 : Cvbge -1 in the current form I'll +1 iff: this is configuration option, off by default if enabled adds a warning message in appropriate places if enabled checks both trimmed and not trimmed password - this way existing passwords with leading/trailing spaces will work ------------------------------------------------------------------------ May 16, 2005 - 19:01 : drumm This should not be a configurable option. A significant portion of Drupal site administrators will not understand such an option. I am guessing the majority won't care. I think in cases like this we need to decide that one way is clearly better and stick to it. I think that trimming is the best thing to do since I've heard about this sort of problem infrequently for the past year. It looks like current passwords which begin or end with a space is a possibly statistically insignificant problem. ------------------------------------------------------------------------ May 16, 2005 - 20:07 : Cvbge This should not be a configurable option. A significant portion of Drupal site administrators will not understand such an option. Eh? How can someone not understand such simple option? Here, let me provide you with a help message: (I have tried to be nice ;)) [x] trim passwords If enabled spaces from begining and ending of user passwords are removed. This is done because users sometime copy&paste passwords with leading or trailing white spaces and can't log in. Enable if you have many stupid users. Enabling this option is safe for you and your users. If you don't understand what you just read then don't touch this option. ------------------------------------------------------------------------ May 16, 2005 - 20:09 : Morbus Iff -1 for yet another configuration option. ------------------------------------------------------------------------ May 16, 2005 - 20:15 : Cvbge If you feel lost among lots of options then let's make a super-hiper-advanced-don't-touch-you-have-been-warned page with many nice but scary options... This way both parties will be happy. ------------------------------------------------------------------------ May 16, 2005 - 20:21 : Morbus Iff Super-hiper-advanced sounds like "edit the code yerself, bub" to me [g]. ------------------------------------------------------------------------ May 16, 2005 - 20:23 : Kobus > If you feel lost among lots of options then let's make a > super-hiper-advanced-don't-touch-you-have-been-warned > page with many nice but scary options... > This way both parties will be happy. +1 for the thread in general, and +1 for this. I am ALL for more and more options, but with SENSIBLE default values, and hidden away to not make the options pages cluttered. If implementing this, maybe weighting opinions in general with this discussion, get the general feel of a new option, and if it's implemented, but not popular, move it away to the super-hyper-advanced page. Kobus ------------------------------------------------------------------------ May 16, 2005 - 20:37 : altano -1 on configuration option. I agree a choice needs to be made on this issue. I don't like the idea of changing something the user enters without telling them. Simply trimming their password at registration seems silly. I think that if a password has spaces in it, it should be rejected with a proper error. Then, all login attempts can use a trimmed password.

1 0

[drupal-devel] [feature] Trim username at login
by altano 16 May '05

16 May '05

Issue status update for http://drupal.org/node/11791 Project: Drupal Version: 4.6.0 Component: user.module Category: feature requests Priority: normal Assigned to: Anonymous Reported by: kps Updated by: altano Status: patch -1 on configuration option. I agree a choice needs to be made on this issue. I don't like the idea of changing something the user enters without telling them. Simply trimming their password at registration seems silly. I think that if a password has spaces in it, it should be rejected with a proper error. Then, all login attempts can use a trimmed password. altano Previous comments: ------------------------------------------------------------------------ October 20, 2004 - 17:29 : kps They create an account. They get a password by email. They select the password plus the preceding blank or following newline. They paste it into the 'Password' box. They can't log in. They write to me complaining. I get tired of complaints and patch user.module to strip leading and trailing blanks. ------------------------------------------------------------------------ October 20, 2004 - 17:39 : kps Attachment: http://drupal.org/files/issues/user.module_0.patch (766 bytes) I claim I'm not *really* dumber myself. Drupal timed out on me.... ------------------------------------------------------------------------ October 20, 2004 - 18:02 : moshe weitzman makes sense to me ------------------------------------------------------------------------ October 20, 2004 - 21:54 : rkendall +1 FWIW - I could see this being useful, and don't really see any practical drawbacks. I does smell of hack, but is that really an issue? I mean, it might not be the 'done' thing to mess with passwords, however, I can't imagine any regular user intentionally putting leading or trailing whitespace on a password, but I can imagine it being done accidentally fairly often (either when setting a password, or when logging in). To be consistent, it would make sense to trim passwords when setting them as well. ------------------------------------------------------------------------ October 20, 2004 - 23:09 : Bèr Kessels -1 from me. I think we should nstart meddling with passwords by trim()ing them. If you have dumb users, you should fix it in the mail that is send to them. That is really easy. For example: add a word after the passwords: your password is WKDKAFAJ34 please mind capital letters. or so. Bèr ------------------------------------------------------------------------ October 20, 2004 - 23:36 : Steven I don't agree with Bèr... copy/pasting is a fiddly business, especially because when pasting a password all you see is asterisks and you don't notice if there is an extra character. Trimming the password won't hurt, I very much doubt that there are people who consciously use a space at the beginning or end of their password. +1 on trimming, it is a usability improvement. ------------------------------------------------------------------------ October 20, 2004 - 23:51 : chx +1 here. Bèr, if you write a sentence around it, you can still copy-paste the whitespace before and after it. ------------------------------------------------------------------------ October 21, 2004 - 01:18 : Uwe Hermann I'm unsure if I really like this, but if this really gets applied, please make it a configuration option. Do not hardcode it for all Drupal installations. Thanks, Uwe. ------------------------------------------------------------------------ October 21, 2004 - 05:06 : robertDouglass +1 I can confirm from my logs that the typical user bungles initial login 1-4 times, with each bungled attempt making an all-out failure more likely. Not only am I in favor of trimming, I am much in favor of investigating other means of initial password assignment like on the initial register form or by generating a unique URL that gets mailed and only has to be clicked or pasted into the browser address bar. Sorry if those alternatives have already been widely discussed here. ------------------------------------------------------------------------ October 21, 2004 - 06:21 : stefan nagtegaal I am all for trimming the spaces in front of the username and after it, but I am absoklutely against another option for such thing. IMO this is only a usability improvement and it is not needed to make it a configurable behaviour.. We have enough options already, and if you'll ask me I'll tell you that we need less options instead of more.. ------------------------------------------------------------------------ October 21, 2004 - 09:58 : Bèr Kessels Admitted: no one will conciously add spaces to his or her passwords. So i will pull out my -1 hereby. but -1 for making ot an option. As steef syis: its useability. I still stick to the -1 for applying this specific patch. I beleive that we should be 1) consitant, and strip /all/ password whitespace. 2) use drupal_set_message() to warn people when whitespace was stripped. And so to educate users to be aware of whitespace when copying passwords. ------------------------------------------------------------------------ October 21, 2004 - 11:39 : kps My proposed patch also strips white space when the user changes the password, so it's not possible to create an unusable password. I agree that a warning message would be a good idea. ------------------------------------------------------------------------ October 21, 2004 - 16:10 : Chris Johnson Part of the problem with users copying and pasting extraneous whitespace around passwords (or userrnames) is the inconsistent behavior in GUI windowing environments. That is to say, in some applications in some GUIs, double-clicking on a word will copy the word and its surrounding white space, for example. In others, it will not. One might think it would be visibly obvious that the surrounding white space was included in the copy operation, but that's not so. The words might be displayed in a very small, proportional font (and further might be justified or kerned in unpredictable fashion) which make it hard to see just where the highlighted copied text begins and ends. This is under the control of the application and the user. Or, the user might think logically that since all he or she wanted was the word, and likewise that "whitespace" is irrelevant, the user may assume that what was copied was only the desired word even if they can visibly see that the adjacent spaces are highlighted. I'm well aware of this behavior myself and even I sometimes get tripped up when copying and pasting bits of data here and there by the occasional undesired white space. My vote would be to always trim leading and trailing white space, and to document in the help that such white space is not valid in passwords. ------------------------------------------------------------------------ March 13, 2005 - 18:25 : killes(a)www.drop.org The patch still applies. Apart from Ber everybody liked it. I also like it. ------------------------------------------------------------------------ March 14, 2005 - 13:42 : Bèr Kessels "apart from Ber everyone liked it", so here a short comment: I still beleive modifying what a user inserts should never be modified. But the current situation is far worse, so I guess it *gets a +1* from me now too :). ------------------------------------------------------------------------ March 15, 2005 - 18:03 : tangent RE #11, if whitespace is not checked for in the password validation it should be. Preventing whitespace from being used is preferable to simply stripping it. ------------------------------------------------------------------------ April 29, 2005 - 19:18 : kps Attachment: http://drupal.org/files/issues/password-trim.patch (951 bytes) Patch against 4.6 attached. ------------------------------------------------------------------------ May 15, 2005 - 21:06 : jakeg I am +10 for this... but so far have leading/trailing spaces been allowed in passwords? If they have, then this causes an obvious problem - users with existing leading/trailing spaces in their passwords will no longer be able to login. You can't pull the password hash out of the database and trim that... that's not how hashes work. If leading/trailing spaces *have* been allowed in the past, then the obvious work around would be: if someone tries to login and enters a leading/trailing space and the login fails, ask them whether their password has one. If it does, get them to reset their password then choose a new one. Of course you also have to ensure that when users setup new passwords/edit their passwords the password hash is made from a trimmed version of their password. You don't have to inform them that its been trimmed. Its irrelevant to them. You just do it. ------------------------------------------------------------------------ May 16, 2005 - 09:51 : Bèr Kessels Please note that chaging the title, affects the whole issue. ------------------------------------------------------------------------ May 16, 2005 - 12:43 : Cvbge -1 in the current form I'll +1 iff: this is configuration option, off by default if enabled adds a warning message in appropriate places if enabled checks both trimmed and not trimmed password - this way existing passwords with leading/trailing spaces will work ------------------------------------------------------------------------ May 16, 2005 - 17:01 : drumm This should not be a configurable option. A significant portion of Drupal site administrators will not understand such an option. I am guessing the majority won't care. I think in cases like this we need to decide that one way is clearly better and stick to it. I think that trimming is the best thing to do since I've heard about this sort of problem infrequently for the past year. It looks like current passwords which begin or end with a space is a possibly statistically insignificant problem. ------------------------------------------------------------------------ May 16, 2005 - 18:07 : Cvbge This should not be a configurable option. A significant portion of Drupal site administrators will not understand such an option. Eh? How can someone not understand such simple option? Here, let me provide you with a help message: (I have tried to be nice ;)) [x] trim passwords If enabled spaces from begining and ending of user passwords are removed. This is done because users sometime copy&paste passwords with leading or trailing white spaces and can't log in. Enable if you have many stupid users. Enabling this option is safe for you and your users. If you don't understand what you just read then don't touch this option. ------------------------------------------------------------------------ May 16, 2005 - 18:09 : Morbus Iff -1 for yet another configuration option. ------------------------------------------------------------------------ May 16, 2005 - 18:15 : Cvbge If you feel lost among lots of options then let's make a super-hiper-advanced-don't-touch-you-have-been-warned page with many nice but scary options... This way both parties will be happy. ------------------------------------------------------------------------ May 16, 2005 - 18:21 : Morbus Iff Super-hiper-advanced sounds like "edit the code yerself, bub" to me [g]. ------------------------------------------------------------------------ May 16, 2005 - 18:23 : Kobus > If you feel lost among lots of options then let's make a > super-hiper-advanced-don't-touch-you-have-been-warned > page with many nice but scary options... > This way both parties will be happy. +1 for the thread in general, and +1 for this. I am ALL for more and more options, but with SENSIBLE default values, and hidden away to not make the options pages cluttered. If implementing this, maybe weighting opinions in general with this discussion, get the general feel of a new option, and if it's implemented, but not popular, move it away to the super-hyper-advanced page. Kobus

1 0

[drupal-devel] [feature] Trim username at login
by Kobus 16 May '05

16 May '05

Issue status update for http://drupal.org/node/11791 Project: Drupal Version: 4.6.0 Component: user.module Category: feature requests Priority: normal Assigned to: Anonymous Reported by: kps Updated by: Kobus Status: patch > If you feel lost among lots of options then let's make a > super-hiper-advanced-don't-touch-you-have-been-warned > page with many nice but scary options... > This way both parties will be happy. +1 for the thread in general, and +1 for this. I am ALL for more and more options, but with SENSIBLE default values, and hidden away to not make the options pages cluttered. If implementing this, maybe weighting opinions in general with this discussion, get the general feel of a new option, and if it's implemented, but not popular, move it away to the super-hyper-advanced page. Kobus Kobus Previous comments: ------------------------------------------------------------------------ October 20, 2004 - 19:29 : kps They create an account. They get a password by email. They select the password plus the preceding blank or following newline. They paste it into the 'Password' box. They can't log in. They write to me complaining. I get tired of complaints and patch user.module to strip leading and trailing blanks. ------------------------------------------------------------------------ October 20, 2004 - 19:39 : kps Attachment: http://drupal.org/files/issues/user.module_0.patch (766 bytes) I claim I'm not *really* dumber myself. Drupal timed out on me.... ------------------------------------------------------------------------ October 20, 2004 - 20:02 : moshe weitzman makes sense to me ------------------------------------------------------------------------ October 20, 2004 - 23:54 : rkendall +1 FWIW - I could see this being useful, and don't really see any practical drawbacks. I does smell of hack, but is that really an issue? I mean, it might not be the 'done' thing to mess with passwords, however, I can't imagine any regular user intentionally putting leading or trailing whitespace on a password, but I can imagine it being done accidentally fairly often (either when setting a password, or when logging in). To be consistent, it would make sense to trim passwords when setting them as well. ------------------------------------------------------------------------ October 21, 2004 - 01:09 : Bèr Kessels -1 from me. I think we should nstart meddling with passwords by trim()ing them. If you have dumb users, you should fix it in the mail that is send to them. That is really easy. For example: add a word after the passwords: your password is WKDKAFAJ34 please mind capital letters. or so. Bèr ------------------------------------------------------------------------ October 21, 2004 - 01:36 : Steven I don't agree with Bèr... copy/pasting is a fiddly business, especially because when pasting a password all you see is asterisks and you don't notice if there is an extra character. Trimming the password won't hurt, I very much doubt that there are people who consciously use a space at the beginning or end of their password. +1 on trimming, it is a usability improvement. ------------------------------------------------------------------------ October 21, 2004 - 01:51 : chx +1 here. Bèr, if you write a sentence around it, you can still copy-paste the whitespace before and after it. ------------------------------------------------------------------------ October 21, 2004 - 03:18 : Uwe Hermann I'm unsure if I really like this, but if this really gets applied, please make it a configuration option. Do not hardcode it for all Drupal installations. Thanks, Uwe. ------------------------------------------------------------------------ October 21, 2004 - 07:06 : robertDouglass +1 I can confirm from my logs that the typical user bungles initial login 1-4 times, with each bungled attempt making an all-out failure more likely. Not only am I in favor of trimming, I am much in favor of investigating other means of initial password assignment like on the initial register form or by generating a unique URL that gets mailed and only has to be clicked or pasted into the browser address bar. Sorry if those alternatives have already been widely discussed here. ------------------------------------------------------------------------ October 21, 2004 - 08:21 : stefan nagtegaal I am all for trimming the spaces in front of the username and after it, but I am absoklutely against another option for such thing. IMO this is only a usability improvement and it is not needed to make it a configurable behaviour.. We have enough options already, and if you'll ask me I'll tell you that we need less options instead of more.. ------------------------------------------------------------------------ October 21, 2004 - 11:58 : Bèr Kessels Admitted: no one will conciously add spaces to his or her passwords. So i will pull out my -1 hereby. but -1 for making ot an option. As steef syis: its useability. I still stick to the -1 for applying this specific patch. I beleive that we should be 1) consitant, and strip /all/ password whitespace. 2) use drupal_set_message() to warn people when whitespace was stripped. And so to educate users to be aware of whitespace when copying passwords. ------------------------------------------------------------------------ October 21, 2004 - 13:39 : kps My proposed patch also strips white space when the user changes the password, so it's not possible to create an unusable password. I agree that a warning message would be a good idea. ------------------------------------------------------------------------ October 21, 2004 - 18:10 : Chris Johnson Part of the problem with users copying and pasting extraneous whitespace around passwords (or userrnames) is the inconsistent behavior in GUI windowing environments. That is to say, in some applications in some GUIs, double-clicking on a word will copy the word and its surrounding white space, for example. In others, it will not. One might think it would be visibly obvious that the surrounding white space was included in the copy operation, but that's not so. The words might be displayed in a very small, proportional font (and further might be justified or kerned in unpredictable fashion) which make it hard to see just where the highlighted copied text begins and ends. This is under the control of the application and the user. Or, the user might think logically that since all he or she wanted was the word, and likewise that "whitespace" is irrelevant, the user may assume that what was copied was only the desired word even if they can visibly see that the adjacent spaces are highlighted. I'm well aware of this behavior myself and even I sometimes get tripped up when copying and pasting bits of data here and there by the occasional undesired white space. My vote would be to always trim leading and trailing white space, and to document in the help that such white space is not valid in passwords. ------------------------------------------------------------------------ March 13, 2005 - 20:25 : killes(a)www.drop.org The patch still applies. Apart from Ber everybody liked it. I also like it. ------------------------------------------------------------------------ March 14, 2005 - 15:42 : Bèr Kessels "apart from Ber everyone liked it", so here a short comment: I still beleive modifying what a user inserts should never be modified. But the current situation is far worse, so I guess it *gets a +1* from me now too :). ------------------------------------------------------------------------ March 15, 2005 - 20:03 : tangent RE #11, if whitespace is not checked for in the password validation it should be. Preventing whitespace from being used is preferable to simply stripping it. ------------------------------------------------------------------------ April 29, 2005 - 21:18 : kps Attachment: http://drupal.org/files/issues/password-trim.patch (951 bytes) Patch against 4.6 attached. ------------------------------------------------------------------------ May 15, 2005 - 23:06 : jakeg I am +10 for this... but so far have leading/trailing spaces been allowed in passwords? If they have, then this causes an obvious problem - users with existing leading/trailing spaces in their passwords will no longer be able to login. You can't pull the password hash out of the database and trim that... that's not how hashes work. If leading/trailing spaces *have* been allowed in the past, then the obvious work around would be: if someone tries to login and enters a leading/trailing space and the login fails, ask them whether their password has one. If it does, get them to reset their password then choose a new one. Of course you also have to ensure that when users setup new passwords/edit their passwords the password hash is made from a trimmed version of their password. You don't have to inform them that its been trimmed. Its irrelevant to them. You just do it. ------------------------------------------------------------------------ May 16, 2005 - 11:51 : Bèr Kessels Please note that chaging the title, affects the whole issue. ------------------------------------------------------------------------ May 16, 2005 - 14:43 : Cvbge -1 in the current form I'll +1 iff: this is configuration option, off by default if enabled adds a warning message in appropriate places if enabled checks both trimmed and not trimmed password - this way existing passwords with leading/trailing spaces will work ------------------------------------------------------------------------ May 16, 2005 - 19:01 : drumm This should not be a configurable option. A significant portion of Drupal site administrators will not understand such an option. I am guessing the majority won't care. I think in cases like this we need to decide that one way is clearly better and stick to it. I think that trimming is the best thing to do since I've heard about this sort of problem infrequently for the past year. It looks like current passwords which begin or end with a space is a possibly statistically insignificant problem. ------------------------------------------------------------------------ May 16, 2005 - 20:07 : Cvbge This should not be a configurable option. A significant portion of Drupal site administrators will not understand such an option. Eh? How can someone not understand such simple option? Here, let me provide you with a help message: (I have tried to be nice ;)) [x] trim passwords If enabled spaces from begining and ending of user passwords are removed. This is done because users sometime copy&paste passwords with leading or trailing white spaces and can't log in. Enable if you have many stupid users. Enabling this option is safe for you and your users. If you don't understand what you just read then don't touch this option. ------------------------------------------------------------------------ May 16, 2005 - 20:09 : Morbus Iff -1 for yet another configuration option. ------------------------------------------------------------------------ May 16, 2005 - 20:15 : Cvbge If you feel lost among lots of options then let's make a super-hiper-advanced-don't-touch-you-have-been-warned page with many nice but scary options... This way both parties will be happy. ------------------------------------------------------------------------ May 16, 2005 - 20:21 : Morbus Iff Super-hiper-advanced sounds like "edit the code yerself, bub" to me [g].

1 0

[drupal-devel] [feature] Trim username at login
by Morbus Iff 16 May '05

16 May '05

Issue status update for http://drupal.org/node/11791 Project: Drupal Version: 4.6.0 Component: user.module Category: feature requests Priority: normal Assigned to: Anonymous Reported by: kps Updated by: Morbus Iff Status: patch Super-hiper-advanced sounds like "edit the code yerself, bub" to me [g]. Morbus Iff Previous comments: ------------------------------------------------------------------------ October 20, 2004 - 12:29 : kps They create an account. They get a password by email. They select the password plus the preceding blank or following newline. They paste it into the 'Password' box. They can't log in. They write to me complaining. I get tired of complaints and patch user.module to strip leading and trailing blanks. ------------------------------------------------------------------------ October 20, 2004 - 12:39 : kps Attachment: http://drupal.org/files/issues/user.module_0.patch (766 bytes) I claim I'm not *really* dumber myself. Drupal timed out on me.... ------------------------------------------------------------------------ October 20, 2004 - 13:02 : moshe weitzman makes sense to me ------------------------------------------------------------------------ October 20, 2004 - 16:54 : rkendall +1 FWIW - I could see this being useful, and don't really see any practical drawbacks. I does smell of hack, but is that really an issue? I mean, it might not be the 'done' thing to mess with passwords, however, I can't imagine any regular user intentionally putting leading or trailing whitespace on a password, but I can imagine it being done accidentally fairly often (either when setting a password, or when logging in). To be consistent, it would make sense to trim passwords when setting them as well. ------------------------------------------------------------------------ October 20, 2004 - 18:09 : Bèr Kessels -1 from me. I think we should nstart meddling with passwords by trim()ing them. If you have dumb users, you should fix it in the mail that is send to them. That is really easy. For example: add a word after the passwords: your password is WKDKAFAJ34 please mind capital letters. or so. Bèr ------------------------------------------------------------------------ October 20, 2004 - 18:36 : Steven I don't agree with Bèr... copy/pasting is a fiddly business, especially because when pasting a password all you see is asterisks and you don't notice if there is an extra character. Trimming the password won't hurt, I very much doubt that there are people who consciously use a space at the beginning or end of their password. +1 on trimming, it is a usability improvement. ------------------------------------------------------------------------ October 20, 2004 - 18:51 : chx +1 here. Bèr, if you write a sentence around it, you can still copy-paste the whitespace before and after it. ------------------------------------------------------------------------ October 20, 2004 - 20:18 : Uwe Hermann I'm unsure if I really like this, but if this really gets applied, please make it a configuration option. Do not hardcode it for all Drupal installations. Thanks, Uwe. ------------------------------------------------------------------------ October 21, 2004 - 00:06 : robertDouglass +1 I can confirm from my logs that the typical user bungles initial login 1-4 times, with each bungled attempt making an all-out failure more likely. Not only am I in favor of trimming, I am much in favor of investigating other means of initial password assignment like on the initial register form or by generating a unique URL that gets mailed and only has to be clicked or pasted into the browser address bar. Sorry if those alternatives have already been widely discussed here. ------------------------------------------------------------------------ October 21, 2004 - 01:21 : stefan nagtegaal I am all for trimming the spaces in front of the username and after it, but I am absoklutely against another option for such thing. IMO this is only a usability improvement and it is not needed to make it a configurable behaviour.. We have enough options already, and if you'll ask me I'll tell you that we need less options instead of more.. ------------------------------------------------------------------------ October 21, 2004 - 04:58 : Bèr Kessels Admitted: no one will conciously add spaces to his or her passwords. So i will pull out my -1 hereby. but -1 for making ot an option. As steef syis: its useability. I still stick to the -1 for applying this specific patch. I beleive that we should be 1) consitant, and strip /all/ password whitespace. 2) use drupal_set_message() to warn people when whitespace was stripped. And so to educate users to be aware of whitespace when copying passwords. ------------------------------------------------------------------------ October 21, 2004 - 06:39 : kps My proposed patch also strips white space when the user changes the password, so it's not possible to create an unusable password. I agree that a warning message would be a good idea. ------------------------------------------------------------------------ October 21, 2004 - 11:10 : Chris Johnson Part of the problem with users copying and pasting extraneous whitespace around passwords (or userrnames) is the inconsistent behavior in GUI windowing environments. That is to say, in some applications in some GUIs, double-clicking on a word will copy the word and its surrounding white space, for example. In others, it will not. One might think it would be visibly obvious that the surrounding white space was included in the copy operation, but that's not so. The words might be displayed in a very small, proportional font (and further might be justified or kerned in unpredictable fashion) which make it hard to see just where the highlighted copied text begins and ends. This is under the control of the application and the user. Or, the user might think logically that since all he or she wanted was the word, and likewise that "whitespace" is irrelevant, the user may assume that what was copied was only the desired word even if they can visibly see that the adjacent spaces are highlighted. I'm well aware of this behavior myself and even I sometimes get tripped up when copying and pasting bits of data here and there by the occasional undesired white space. My vote would be to always trim leading and trailing white space, and to document in the help that such white space is not valid in passwords. ------------------------------------------------------------------------ March 13, 2005 - 13:25 : killes(a)www.drop.org The patch still applies. Apart from Ber everybody liked it. I also like it. ------------------------------------------------------------------------ March 14, 2005 - 08:42 : Bèr Kessels "apart from Ber everyone liked it", so here a short comment: I still beleive modifying what a user inserts should never be modified. But the current situation is far worse, so I guess it *gets a +1* from me now too :). ------------------------------------------------------------------------ March 15, 2005 - 13:03 : tangent RE #11, if whitespace is not checked for in the password validation it should be. Preventing whitespace from being used is preferable to simply stripping it. ------------------------------------------------------------------------ April 29, 2005 - 14:18 : kps Attachment: http://drupal.org/files/issues/password-trim.patch (951 bytes) Patch against 4.6 attached. ------------------------------------------------------------------------ May 15, 2005 - 16:06 : jakeg I am +10 for this... but so far have leading/trailing spaces been allowed in passwords? If they have, then this causes an obvious problem - users with existing leading/trailing spaces in their passwords will no longer be able to login. You can't pull the password hash out of the database and trim that... that's not how hashes work. If leading/trailing spaces *have* been allowed in the past, then the obvious work around would be: if someone tries to login and enters a leading/trailing space and the login fails, ask them whether their password has one. If it does, get them to reset their password then choose a new one. Of course you also have to ensure that when users setup new passwords/edit their passwords the password hash is made from a trimmed version of their password. You don't have to inform them that its been trimmed. Its irrelevant to them. You just do it. ------------------------------------------------------------------------ May 16, 2005 - 04:51 : Bèr Kessels Please note that chaging the title, affects the whole issue. ------------------------------------------------------------------------ May 16, 2005 - 07:43 : Cvbge -1 in the current form I'll +1 iff: this is configuration option, off by default if enabled adds a warning message in appropriate places if enabled checks both trimmed and not trimmed password - this way existing passwords with leading/trailing spaces will work ------------------------------------------------------------------------ May 16, 2005 - 12:01 : drumm This should not be a configurable option. A significant portion of Drupal site administrators will not understand such an option. I am guessing the majority won't care. I think in cases like this we need to decide that one way is clearly better and stick to it. I think that trimming is the best thing to do since I've heard about this sort of problem infrequently for the past year. It looks like current passwords which begin or end with a space is a possibly statistically insignificant problem. ------------------------------------------------------------------------ May 16, 2005 - 13:07 : Cvbge This should not be a configurable option. A significant portion of Drupal site administrators will not understand such an option. Eh? How can someone not understand such simple option? Here, let me provide you with a help message: (I have tried to be nice ;)) [x] trim passwords If enabled spaces from begining and ending of user passwords are removed. This is done because users sometime copy&paste passwords with leading or trailing white spaces and can't log in. Enable if you have many stupid users. Enabling this option is safe for you and your users. If you don't understand what you just read then don't touch this option. ------------------------------------------------------------------------ May 16, 2005 - 13:09 : Morbus Iff -1 for yet another configuration option. ------------------------------------------------------------------------ May 16, 2005 - 13:15 : Cvbge If you feel lost among lots of options then let's make a super-hiper-advanced-don't-touch-you-have-been-warned page with many nice but scary options... This way both parties will be happy.

1 0