LinkedIn Password Length Confusion

I changed my password on LinkedIn to a 20 character password. There was no indication how long the password should be and no error message after I changed it, indicating that my password was accepted. But as I tried to login with the new password I received the following error message: “The email address or password you provided does not match our records.” So I used the “Forgot Password” feature to reset the password to the new password again which did not work either. This made me wonder if my password length of 20 characters is valid. Again, I did not find any restrictions for password length and my password was accepted, meaning I did not get an error message after I changed it to a 20 character password.

After asking the LinkedIn Customer Support I received the following answer:
“The length for a password is between 6 to 16 characters!”

My suggestion to LinkedIn:
Add a query to the code that checks the lengths of the password and if it is below 6 and above 16 then 1) do not accept the password and 2) give out an error message stating the restrictions to the password length, so that there is no more confusion. In addition stating the information about the password length restrictions on the website would also be helpful.

Tags: LinkedIn, password length

Verenas Welt Blog | Verena 2008/12/09

11 Kommentare

By Rebecca, 2008/12/09 @ 11:36

Funny you should mention that – today I was having problems with it accepting the password I’d previously saved for it. I also went for the “forgot password” option and changed it (back to what I’d thought it was all along, which was definitely 6-16 characters…), but even then it didn’t like it. Eventually it seemed to relent and accepted it.

A bit weird.
By Christian, 2009/04/16 @ 12:32

thanks – I was going nuts. I have now reset my password for linkedin 5 times. I can only assume that linkedin passwords should not contain “%&# signs either.
By Jared, 2009/05/04 @ 13:05

Same problem. Thanks for the post.
By Bill, 2009/06/16 @ 22:25

Thanks for that. Those rules should be on the password changing page as well as in the error message when you create a message (as you mention), not your blog. Sigh. So many web sites get that common function wrong.
By Lew, 2009/08/19 @ 23:03

Even though I had reset my password to more than 16 characters with a message of success, I was unable to login using the new password (until I only typed the 16 first characters of it and shazaam, now it works). Thanks for the tip.
By Sri Prakash, 2010/02/04 @ 12:18

Its a problem with the linkedin password field; wish they would publish what it accepts and does not!!! I had a frustrating time especially as I was trying ti ‘tighten’ my password!!!!
By WilhelmR, 2010/03/05 @ 21:14

Still not fixed, seems like linked in should search for some UX people in their own system…
By Josh, 2010/05/13 @ 10:38

Seems that they do not allow any special characters, either.
By Jagat, 2010/06/01 @ 21:36

Thanks for this post. Pathetic problem on linkedin site. I had to click on ‘forgot password’ thrice before I ended up googling and found this post.

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