Enhance Change Expiration Time
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#2161 Enhance Change Expiration Time
I would like to suggest an enhancement for the "Change expiration time" menu that I believe would be useful.
The current entries: Now, 1 week, 2 weeks, 1 month, 2 months, 3 months and 1 year may be adequate for some users, but I cannot think of a single password expiration that I have encountered that was not specified as a number of days. The "Change expiration time" feature of KeePass would be much more useful to me and I believe many other users if the user could specify the number of days until the password expires.
In fact, rather than adding more entries to the menu you could eliminate the menu entirely and present a modal window with a field for a number and a dropdown list of units: days, weeks, months, years. Now could be specified by the user could entering 0 for the number and the units specified would not matter.
Absolutely.! Microsofts Active Directory setting is in "number of days" an d 3 months is not the same as 90 days especially if you are around February through Apri given the number of days differs in each month (and February differs depending on the year). You can test it for yourself here -> https://www.timeanddate.com/date/dateadd.html?d1=11&m1=6&y1=2018& or see attachment
At the time I wrote this suggestion I had not encountered any password expirations that were not specified as a number of days, however, since then the Social Security Administration has changed from a number of days to six months. which is also not covered by the current entries in the Change Expriation Time menu. While it is not that difficult to figure out with a calendar, why should I have to when a computer can do it much more quickly and accurately without the need for me (the user) to know the standard rules for calculating month spans.
Regarding Trae G's truthful comment that three months is not the same as 90 days, his statement regarding the effect of February on three month spans is a little off. The effect of February actually begins with three month spans that start on 29 November of the previous year (30 November if the February in question is in a leap year) and extends to the 28th or 29th of May.
It should be noted that February is not the only month that causes variation in the lenght of 3 month spans. The variation in length of all the other months of the year between 30 days and 31 days affects the length of all three month spans that can occur within a year. Thus, over the four year leap year cycle the length of a three month span can vary from as little as 89 days to as much as 92 days.
You don't need to use KeePass to remind you about password change, the systems you use will do that. If you want to use KeePass, close enough is good enough for a reminder.
cheers, Paul
Thank you Paul, I appreciate knowing your opinion on the matter and as a retired software developer I understand why you would not want to make changes to an application that you feel are not necessary. At least now I know that I should not hold my breath waiting for my suggestion to be implemented.
However, I do have a question: If that is how you feel about the password expiration feature, why was it included in the first place?
While you may feel that "close enough is good enough," (and knowing that I can understand how it informed the design and implementation of the feature), I do not feel that way. It is true that systems that enforce the expiration of passwords will inform the user when the password has expired, some that I have encountered even nag, or should I say inform, for what I feel is an exorbitent length of time before the password expires (one system that I used at work had a 60 day expriration and a 14 day nag period, which meant that if you did not want to endure 13 days of nagging you had to change your password every 46 days). However, most of the passwords that I have stored in KeePass are for websites that I log into only infrequently (which is the very reason that I use KeePass in the first place). So I am unlikely to see any warnings in the pre-expiration window, if they even do that. You might wonder why I even care if I only log in to them infrequently. The reason is that some of the ones that enforce password epiration have onerous procedures for changing a password once the old one has expired. My purpose in using the password expiration feature of KeePass is to minimize the pain of changing expired passwords, therefore, I would like to change them 'just in time' and thus maximize the tenure of the passwords while minimizing the changing of them. I made my suggestion because I feel that your idea of "close enough" is not precise enough for my operating model and I thouoght that there might be others who felt the same way, obviously there was one who found my suggestion and agreed with me.
First, I am not the developer of KeePass and have no say in the design decisions, apart from discussions here.
"Close enough" means within a couple of days, which you can do with a bit of counting on the expiry calendar. This doesn't mean we won't see a "number of days" option at some stage, but it has been 2 years since this request was opened.
cheers, Paul
I think you need to enter a field in the settings where you can independently specify the desired expiration time intervals in the form of: NumericLetter
example: 45d, 90d, 5m, 2y
month year: 45 day, 90 day, 5 month, 2 year
the user needs to be given more flexible settings. let the user specify the necessary parameters in advance in the settings
My Password Expiry Date Calculator - PEDCalc should give enough flexbility.
You can set expiry as days, weeks, months and years and whenever you update a password, the expiry date is updated as well
I think this or similar functionality should be added to the main program. the plugin is not always convenient, it is better to have all these functions inside the program itself
let's just add more date values as a temporary solution. compare the current version and the new one with a large number of dates in the picture. I have a lot of accounts where you need to change your password in 60, 90, 120 and 180 days. so I put it 5 days before the end.
If Password Expiry Date Calculator - PEDCalc doesn't meet your needs you can check out KeePassCPEO.