Update about Autofill improvements in Beta

In response to filmjbrandon (with apologies), and to any ABits folks (e.g. 1P_Travis or @ag_Gabriele), the problem is much bigger, IMO, than simply exposing an API to allow capable people to hack on their entries en-masse. While a nice idea, the fundamental solution that AG has exposed, namely the idea of "only fill on this exact domain", is completely insufficient to handle even the most modest of use cases. Let me explain my thinking:

Imagine even a small business IT/DevOps group with a modest number of (in-house or cloud-based) hosts they manage. Even some of the smallest such organizations will have dozens of "hosts", and they will likely be added to (or removed) over time. Having to set some "only fill on exactly this domain" on each new entry is exceedingly painful and, IMO, completely unnecessary. There is more than sufficient information even given the limited form of URLs that can be usefully entered into 1Password. With some useful heuristics, one can simply sort the entries by a closest-match algorithm and thus present the user with the most likely entry up front, with no manual work on the part of the user. For a complete solution, I urge anyone to look at my suggestions in an earlier post:

https://1password.community/discussion/comment/673589/#Comment_673589

Furthermore, with a little bit of additional smarts, e.g. if the tool supported some form of regex in the URLs, those with even modestly complicated environments, like my own, could say things like:

https://server[0-9].example.com

... and have the entry match a collection of hosts rather than being forced to add a separate URL for each of those N hosts.

Furthermore, this will support even novice users, and those who cannot (or don't want to) work though an API to flip bits on every entry.

Now, I know that the ABits folks are good and talented, and that they'd rather keep internal ideas mum for competitive advantage, but someone from AG could at least comment on my proposed set of changes, even say "interesting idea - we'll take it to the dev team", that would be greatly appreciated.

As it stands now, the 1P8 approach, with the removal of the "smart suggestions" feature, is again a step backwards from the excellent 1P7 version.

Hi all, not sure if 1P is still listening to these threads 1P_Travis , but I want to first thank you for the functionality, and I appreciate how quickly you were able to get this work done in the beta.

I'm going to make an assumption that many of the users who want this feature would be of the following personas:
* Technical users (developers or PMs)
* Migrating from a competitor

and if so, their use cases fall into one of a few buckets:
* 1) They have a handful of cases where this is useful, but are happy with the default behavior.
* 2) They have many cases (in some cases maybe an entire Vault) where they want to change all at once.
* 3) They need to customize the behavior across a variety of different entries.

Your current solution addresses bucket #1.

For bucket #2, it is also likely that it's a one-time operation, and that future items might benefit from a default, but could be managed on a 1 by 1 basis after the initial batch processing.

For bucket #3, customization for technical users is best done at the API level, if it's done at all as this is likely only a handful of highly technical users who have this case.

Given this, I strongly recommend, regardless of what you might want to do with the feature in the future that you at minimum expose the current autofill override functionality to the CLI, so that your technical users can either write a simple loop to apply to a subset of items, or can configure their own logic to determine which ones should have the logic and which ones should not. For non-technical users who are migrating from a competitor, my guess is they'll land on a support forum like this, and a more experienced user can explain (or even provide) a script that does what they want.

Without this, at the moment it's just a painful transition for people such as myself who have had this feature for years in a competitor offering.

Thanks!

esquared I just have about 10 domains at my homeserver, e.g.
- name1.domain.com
- name2.domain.com
- name3.domain.com
- ...
- name10.domain.com

And with the new option "only fill on this exact domain" - I see only two options (name1 and name4) instead of 10. Second one is incorrect, seems it's a bug, but two are still better then 10 :)

@DeniDoman - thanks for the feedback. The problem as I see it, is that I have 100s of entries for each network I manage, and I cannot possibly go through and check the box for "fill only on this exact domain" on each one - in fact, that would be problematic, since I have the same entry (password) on several subdomains (e.g. switch1.example.com through switch15.example.com) and therefore I'd have to check that box on each and every URL in the entry. Heck, I'm not even sure it's going to do the right thing.

There is way more information in the set of URLs that a given entry has than 1Password takes advantage of currently. Hence my suggestion that some form of smart ordering based upon match factors (e.g. exact match, match w/out ports, Levenshtein distance, etc) would provide a whole lot of more value for a lot of people without requiring that they turn the fill suggestion into a overly simplistic boolean.

esquared I have about 10 domains at my homeserver, e.g.:

• name1.domain.com
• name2.domain.com
• name3.domain.com
• ...
• name10.domain.com

And with the new option "only fill on this exact domain" enabled for all of them - I see only two options (name1 and name4) instead of 10. Second one is incorrect, seems it's a bug, but two are still better then 10 :)

UPD: Now second item has disappeared. It has 4 websites, 2 of them were on my domain and have new option enabled, other two were on different domain and new option was disabled. After setting new option for all 4 websites - the issue gone and now it credentials shown only on these 4 domains.

@DeniDoman - I'm really curious what you've done to feel as if the current implementation is an improvement? I'm still struggling with all the same issues I described at length in my previous post (just above yours). That's still true even though I'm on the latest beta (8.10.1) and browser extension (Firefox, w/ version 2.8.0).

Fundamentally, I still get all the wrong suggestions up front because they match the second-level domain name of my network(s) (e.g. example.com), and yet I'm looking for the one and only entry that immediately matches the exact URL (e.g. https://thing.example.com).

I'd also like to hear some feedback from Agile Bits, perhaps @ag_Gabriele, on what is the eventual direction of the autofill suggestions. I made some very reasonable suggestions myself and I've heard nothing but crickets. :-(

Just wanted to say thank you! I have several subdomains in my home lab server, and now it's 100x easier to autofill credentials.

Followup and comments on current behavior (using macOS desktop beta 8.10.0 and Firefox plugin beta 2.6.1).

I'm not sure what the expected behavior is currently, but neither the desktop beta specification "only fill on this exact domain" nor the (apparently on-the-way-out) "Improved Autofill Suggestions" browser plug-in seem to have any affect on what entries are offered or allowed for a given website. That is:

• I can still select and fill any 1Password entry regardless of the "Autofill Behavior" setting of "only fill..." or "never fill..." options.
• The options "only" or "never" also seem to have no affect on what options are suggested, nor the order of the suggestions.
• The "Improved Autofill Suggestions" browser extension setting seems to do nothing, though it may now be a meaningless option, with the underlying behavior disabled.
• Furthermore, it has never been apparent to me that the same "improve suggestions" feature did anything useful in the context of multiple items with matching (second-level) domain names - that is, if a website matches *.example.com, it will be offered. That's unfortunately not very helpful when one has many sets of credentials for many sub-domains; e.g. only-this.example.com.

I'm not sure if there is documented intended behavior, but as I noted in a previous comment, the referenced webpage about "autofill behavior" is currently a 404. Knowing what the current or future expected behavior would give us all a common starting point to discuss. Any chance someone from 1P/AB can share that?

The fundamental use case is someone (like me and my whole company) who work with many systems that have similar or exact domain matches. That is, it's only the full hostname that really matters most of the time. If I have foo.example.com, I'm (almost) never going to want that to fill on bar.example.com. Moreover, it's rarely helpful to even suggest anything else from the entire domain example.com when there is an exact match for the full hostname (and possibly port) of a given URL for a given 1P entry.

So, this is are first cut at the critical requirements for a suitable implementation of autofill suggestion ordering:
- URL matches also designated "only fill on this exact domain"
- exact domain matches, including ports and paths
- exact domain matches, excluding ports and paths
- closest match considering matching sub-domains as more relevant (e.g. if filling on host.example.com, suggest host.example.com before example.com, and both before any other.example.com)
- closest match, using something like Levenshtein distance, w/ and w/out port or path components.
- favorited entries, matching base domain
- everything else, possibly after a visual break and perhaps a heading like "possible alternatives"
- Anything marked as "never fill" should never even be suggested.

As a bonus, if there was some way to specify regular expressions or GLOB-style matching (e.g. *.sub.domain.com or foo[0-9]*.example.com) to match multiple allowed sub-domains or hosts.

With that, the suggested ordering will more closely match what people are trying to do, which is the whole point of anything that is trying to guess (suggest) what the user is trying to do (aka. intent recognition).

I hope that is useful, and really hope that it somewhat matches what the 1P team is working towards. I'm happy to iterate on the requirements if someone wants more input from someone who has 1000s (yes 1000s) of entries and dozens or 100s of entries that match and are suggested currently.

@ag_Gabriele or 1P_Travis -- I'm experimenting with the new autofill behaviors and the first thing I note is that the link to help documentation in the 1Password desktop client takes you to a non-existent page: https://support.1password.com/autofill-behavior/ .

Correct link but page not published, or link wrong? It's a 404, not a 403, so I'm assuming it's either of those and not a permissions issue. Regardless, would love to read the docs on how you expect this to work.

Try editing a record... in the url field you should have the possibility to change the behaviour for autofill