I would like to address a comment that I read from a concerned IL member;
| Quote:: |
| My user name and password from here worked at the other site. |
I believe there was another that I read somewhere that was a little more in depth about the passwords here and on IL. Let me explain how our passwords work.
When you sign up, you give our system a password that you would like to use. When you do so, your password, which is simply a string of characters, gets encrypted with MD5 encryption (Message Digest Algorithm 5 - a 128 bit encryption method) and stored in our database. What does this mean? Your password gets turned into a large string of characters which represents your password.
For example, if I entered the password t14_6eb89Q, it would be turned into an MD5 hash of a8134bc66d0864b37bf55b40b7384691. This hash is ONE WAY ENCRYPTION and cannot be decrypted. Sure, there are sites out there that claim to have MD5 decryption scripts... but they are database based... meaning someone has typed words in and placed the word and corresponding MD5 hash into a database... unless you have typed that particular string into the MD5 encryption of that site, it will not be decrypted... that's how they get the database, from you!
So, how do we verify your password? Easy. When you log in, you type in your password, the site converts it to an MD5 hash and compares it to your MD5 hash already stored in our database. Your password is
never revealed to us in plain text.
So, what happens when you retrieve a lost password? Well, you can't retrieve a lost password... we don't know it! Remember?

A new password is automatically generated by our system, sent to you and then MD5 hashed. This means that we cannot retrieve your password here and use it to access IL.
Think about it... that works both ways. If it was possible for me to retrieve passwords and go to IL, it would be possible for IL to retrieve passwords and come here, posing as someone else. If I thought that could happen, all of our passwords would have been changed here.