Please, don’t crop down my password if it is too long

I need to vent because I have just run into this again.

When you are signing up to a website, there is often a maximum password length.

Here’s the list of what I have seen when I enter a password that is too long. In order of OK to terrible:

1. You get an alert before you even submit the form
2. You press submit, and the form bounces back telling you what to change
3. You submit and they just trim the password down to size, then move on telling you everything is OK

The last one is what I am talking about. It sounds insane, but it has happened to me so often I felt the need to bring it up here.

Of course this means that you are immediately locked out of your account, because the password on file for you isn’t the one you typed in when you signed up.

Next time you create an account somewhere with a long password and you can’t log in immediately afterwards, try trimming the password down one character at a time. I have lost count of the times this has worked for me.