A  few people have expressed concern about their passwords being transmitted by email, which could possibly be read by somebody else on their computer or intercepted along the way. You can now opt-out of having your password transmitted by email. There is a new setting in the My Account panel, and also when you create an account, to control whether or not your password is emailed to you when it is created or changed. You can still click the Forgotten Password link to request that your password be emailed to you.

We have also had complaints in the past that we don’t offer enough long-enough passwords, and we recently discovered that although we had allowed users to create passwords of up to 10 characters, our system was actually only storing (and comparing) the first 8 characters. We have increased the length of the password to a maximum of 15 characters and fixed the length-discrepancy bug.  If you try to log in using a password that is 9 or 10 characters, and the first 8 characters match what we have on file, you will get a message offering to update your password to what you just typed. If you choose Yes, your password will be updated (and, optionally, emailed to you). If you answer No, you will be logged in with your 8-character password, but if you try to log in later with the longer password, you will see the same message again. To get rid of the message, either change your password to the 8-character version in your My Account panel, or answer Yes and let the system update your password to the longer version, or change it to the longer version yourself after you are logged in.

Please email us if you have any trouble logging in or changing your username or password - it’s entirely possible that something might have been broken by all these code changes.