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Is it fine if a website says "email already in use" before you hit submit? (lemmy.world)
submitted 1 year ago by to c/cybersecurity@sh.itjust.works
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I remember hearing before that it's a sign they are storing your info unencrypted but I never checked.

Is this true? I was logging into a .gov website and noticed it does that.

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[–] 2 points 1 year ago (5 children)

100% why I wrote "the even more stupid form". Someone isn't sanitizing inputs and it drives me nuts every time.

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  • [–] 2 points 1 year ago* (4 children)

    Idk, I don't think silently removing whitespace in the middle of the text is appropriate (though beginning and end should be stripped), but the form should warm you when there's obviously invalid input.

    Silently "correcting" input can be really annoying. For example, my SO's first name has multiple capitals, and some forms "helpfully" split it into two words and the first name gets cut. If I know that, I can spell it without the capitals, but sometimes it doesn't let me know and I need to call in to get it fixed.

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  • [–] 1 point 1 year ago (3 children)

    Oh I was talking about trimming an email, if it wasn't clear. Spaces are not valid characters so there is really no situation where they should happen. I do agree with you that an explicit message telling the user there is invalid input might be more appropriate, but if you know the correction to apply, I'd still apply it automatically ("hey we noticed you had spaces and we removed them; click here to keep them" or something)

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  • [–] 2 points 1 year ago (2 children)

    Right, and trim is for the beginning and end. FUTO Keyboard will put spaces after periods, so it'll frequently try to enter something like first. Last @domain.Com. The casing isn't an issue because emails (and all URLs) should be treated as case insensitive.

    I wouldn't expect a site to remove all whitespace, only leading and talking trailing whitespace, and then present an error if the email address is obviously invalid. There are libraries for this, and I think a simple regex would also be sufficient to catch most issues (search online for a vetted one).

    Spaces are technically allowed before the @, provided you wrap it in quotes. That's incredibly rare and validating that is a bit of a pain, so I'd stick with making it an error instead of silently stripping what could be a valid, but unsupported, email address, since that would cause more confusion than an error.

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