Foolishly reveal your password creation strategies

[notdavidlynch]

Lots of people create passwords in stupid ways.. Using whole words, using personal information, etc. Others also create passwords in sort of a dumb way: long strings of random characters that they can't remember, so they write them down or have them sitting in a text file or image somewhere on their computer.

What strategies do you know of that avoid both? Of course, you don't want to reveal enough that someone could hack your account here.

I personally base my passwords on personal information, but not my own personal information. Instead I use the personal information of other people who aren't family members, significant others, or professional acquaintances. Usually, they're people who I no longer have any kind of relationship with for whatever reason, but who I still know enough about. I typically use 1-3 such people to create a password.

For instance (and this is purely made up):

There was this kid named Jimmy Schmidt who was kinda fat in the 2nd grade.
I had a crush on a girl named Shirley Temple in the 10th grade but she told me that she hated me in an e-mail.

... processing ...

New password: j#s2s@t10

Super easy for me to remember because it's related to people & information about them from my past that no one else knows that I know and there's a narrative around it. The modular construction and (usually) symmetrical nature also makes it easy to create variations such that I don't use the same one on all sites. For instance:

For Facebook: fj#s2s@t10b
For GMail: gj#s2s@t10m

or, make the people chosen and the narrative around them relate to the site in some way instead of using modifiers.

I dunno. Just something I was thinking about. The specific information chosen and the pattern of arrangement varies so it's as good as random, but far easier to remember.

[Madrigal]

My password is "password".

[Linnea]

At the moment I'm just using whatever I see around me when I'm creating a password. Sometimes I combine two unrelated words. And I switch some letters to numbers. Usually I remember them but for rarely used sites I have to request a new password quite often. So this is not the best system but since it mostly works why bother changing it.

[ACow]

I've taken to geometric shapes and relationships on the qwerty/other keyboard. Thus when work asks you to reset it every month, you just move it around the keyboard spatially/relationship-ally in some way.

I.e. some king of square with an anchor point in the bottom right corner for the obligatory upper/lower cases: de345tGf.

Or I can do some kind of butterfly thing: xde3$5rfv

These can then be moved around the keyboard.

Of course, i could just do what everyone else does and add an incremental number onto the end of their old passwords.

[James]

This site provided about 5 minutes of entertainment.

https://howsecureismypassword.net

Adding symbols like £ or * seem to be the way to go. Easy to remember visual reference that can significantly enhance any password, or so it appears based on this website.

[Linnea]

Would you trust this app (or something similar) to handle your passwords?

[Osito Polar]

I usually remember a series of short words and a number. I put special characters between the words and the numbers.

Sorta like this:

ape!car*trombone-178

But not for every site. Some, I just don't care that much.

[Blorg]

All my passwords are variations on the same two words, plus the numbers 1 or 2 at the end. I don't care.

[MarkovChain]

[Hephaestus]

^I've always used a variant of the XKCD method. I'm always annoyed when told what I have to have in my password. Such as mandating that I have at least one capital letter, and a number and a special character. It's annoying and just increases the likelihood I wont remember the password.