Changing the Amtrak Password

RonHeiby

I am signed in with my Amtrak account, looking at https://tickets.amtrak.com/itd/amtrak and click the button to View / Edit my profile information. Buried in there is the ability to change my password. Clicking it pops up a whole new window that says helpful things about how the new password should be constructed, including that it must be over 8 characters, not include my Email address, include numbers or special characters.

OK, so I give it a nice complex 30 character password. It barfs, telling me that I have to have 8-20 characters. Fine. It could have told me that in the first place, but now I know what's going on.

I give it a nice complex 20 character password. It barfs, telling me that I have used an illegal character, and now lists the special characters it is willing to accept. Fine. It could have told me that in the first place, but now I know what's going on.

I give it a nice complex 20 character password, substituting its acceptable special characters for those 1Password generated that were not on the list. It barfs, telling me the same BS about the special characters it is willing to accept. Fine. It's confused.

I give it a nice moderately complex 20 character password without any special characters. It barfs, telling me the same BS about the special characters it is willing to accept. WTF? I didn't give it any special characters. Fine. It's really confused.

I think maybe it's confused about how many characters 20 is, so I give it a nice moderately complex 19 character password without any special characters. It barfs, telling me the same BS about the special characters it is willing to accept. WTF? I didn't give it any special characters. Fine. It's really confused.

At this point, I do not know how to change the password for Amtrak.

BTW, Is there any way to delete bogus "Previously used passwords" that were never actually used?

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1Password Version: 6.1 (610005)
Extension Version: Not Provided
OS Version: OS X 10.11.3
Sync Type: Not Provided

thightower

@RonHeiby

No there is not a way to delete the previous used passwords. Its a safety feature of sorts. That is if you are talking about the listing on the actual login.

As to Amtrak, last year I tried to do the same with the wife's password and went through the whole list of things you mention above.
I ended up removing all special characters and using only upper/lower case letters in addition to numbers, at 15 digits long was my magic number. I was not happy about having to restrict my password to such limitations.

I too became hugely annoyed at the special character warning. It took me several times to get it accept a password.

Being just another user I wish you the best of luck. Maybe the staff will have some other suggestions.

littlebobbytables

Greetings @RonHeiby,

I can only sympathise with your frustration and relate with one of my own experiences. I was attempting to update one account and they included their password requirements on the password change form page. I followed their guidelines, the password was accepted and I saved the new password in 1Password. As I always do I then log out and log back in. On this occasion I found myself locked out.

I follow their password reset instructions and try again.

I repeated this a few times, every time their form accepting the new password and telling me my password had been changed.

Eventually I contacted their customer support who informed me not to use symbols in my password even though their own site specified a list of supposedly acceptable symbols and allowed me to set a password using them!

Basically some sites are just terrible and we as the customers are stuck with it, having to fight through whatever madness there is to discern the truth. I swear it's almost like they expect us to use passwords like password123 as if we don't care about our online security.

Sorry, that might have gotten a little ranty there.

As to your question about the password history. There isn't a way to prune it from inside 1Password but depending on how confident you are with some text editing it is possible to export the item in a user-readable format, edit the item and then import back in. You would then simply delete the original item once you're happy that the new and edited one is fine. Is this something that would interest you or does it sound a little too hacky for your preferences? It's really about comfort levels more than anything else. If you're interested just say :smile:

RonHeiby

While confident with text editing, that seems like more trouble than it's worth. But congrats on a good hack!

jxpx777

Definitely understood, @RonHeiby. Some users are pretty exacting about the tidiness of their data, so we like to offer the options we have, even if they're a little bit convoluted. :)