GNOME Bugzilla – Bug 592978
Policykit-GNOME : Unfriendly message upon authentication failure
Last modified: 2019-02-23 02:44:54 UTC
This bug has been reported at launchpad - https://bugs.launchpad.net/hundredpapercuts/+bug/411559 When I type my password incorrectly at GDM, and also at PolicyKit dialogs, the response is a label displaying the words "Authentication Failure." This would likely give my grandmother a heart attack. Instead, we should project kindness and understanding so our user who is struggling to remember her password, or perhaps made a typo, does not feel that she has just "failed". I recommend we use: "Authentication Failed. (Please check you entered the correct password)" The reason for this being that this message might come up when their is something wrong with PolicyKit (ie. the authentication didn't happen because something is broken). We don't want to tell users/developers/ (most importantly) bug trackers that the issue was the password and not policykit failing. That could lead to many a confused bug report. However at the same time we also want to be user friendly which is why I feel this string is most appropriate
My original bug report on Launchpad deals with the case where the user actually typed an incorrect password, not where authentication failed in general, and my suggestion was to use the phrasing: "Incorrect password. Please try again." If we know that the user entered an incorrect password, we should display the message above. On the other hand, if authentication failed for another reason, by all means, we should not display an "incorrect password" warning. If PolicyKit does responsible error reporting, these situations will not be ambiguous and we do not need a "Some backend error occurred OR maybe your password was wrong" warning, which seems like the application you've just typed your password into is confused about what went wrong and is guessing. This is not very reassuring. Can you imagine typing your password into your internet banking account and seeing a message "Authentication failure (Or maybe you typed your password wrong, we don't know!)".
Created attachment 144458 [details] [review] Changes authentication failure message
The result of the discussion in the Ubuntu bug was the safest test was: "Your authentication attempt was unsuccessful. Please try again" Do the PolicyKit GNOME authors have any opinions on this?
policykit-gnome is not under active development anymore. Its codebase has been archived: https://gitlab.gnome.org/Archive/policykit-gnome/commits/master Closing this report as WONTFIX as part of Bugzilla Housekeeping to reflect reality. Please feel free to reopen this ticket (or rather reactivate the project to GNOME Gitlab, as GNOME Bugzilla is deprecated) if anyone takes the responsibility for active development again.