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by tudorconstantin 3342 days ago
When you want to retrieve the password for an account you created 5 years ago, but you only remember creating it between 5 and 15 years ago and you have 2 dog loving grandma's each of whom have 2-3 old doggos all the time....well, good luck in remembering and identifying the correct name of the possible 10-15 dogs
2 comments

This is a case where you think of an _idealized_ grandma, and her perfectly preserved dog, `Mr. Mycroft Applebottom III`, who has been sitting on her mantlepiece since you were in gradeschool. [0]

The site doesn't have to know you're making it up.

0: Obviously, it'd be better if your idealized grandma spoke with your password generator beforehand, and therefore named her dog something less guessable, like `ff627f056c51b694e2e5d0bdc168c647`.

That's a good suggestion actually: just remember that you always ignore the question, and you've saved the actual securely generated answer as 'sitename-sec-question' or whatever.
Right but if there are six possible dogs at creation time you choose a different question.

If the answer is unique when you create it, but a new dog comes into the picture when you need to recall it, I doubt that's going to cause much of a problem. Maybe you get it wrong once and try again - you're only going through this because you already forgot your password.