WeBWorK Main Forum

Automated password recovery

Automated password recovery

by Arturo Portnoy -
Number of replies: 3
A suggested improvement would be to add automated password recovery to webwork, so that students who forget their password can recover them through e-mail. With populations of thousands of students, this becomes an issue for the administrator.
In reply to Arturo Portnoy

Re: Automated password recovery

by Edwin Flórez -
I am not sure about that option directly, but as WebWork can now run in the background of a LMS like Moodle, I think it is not as priority for developers. But of course it would be nice to have that option. Let's see what the experts say. 

Maybe you can leave that job to the teachers assigned to each section. 
In reply to Arturo Portnoy

Re: Automated password recovery

by Murphy Waggoner -
This would be a priority for us.  We don't run through an LMS.  

In particular, I am struggling with courses built by faculty who suddenly left us in June.  I would like to get in and use the WebWork courses they had already developed, but I can't because I don't know their password (they claim they have forgotten theirs) and I wasn't an instructor in the class.

How can I reset their passwords without having to go to IT?
In reply to Murphy Waggoner

Re: Automated password recovery

by Dick Lane -
The WeBWorK administrator (the person who creates courses using the "admin course") should be able to login (as admin, using admin's password) to an orphaned course and change a password for a specified user.

In any event, a person with shell access to the server and suitable privileges on that server has the option of running the "newpassword" command (it is in webwork2/webwork/bin).

Read the commented code to see the syntax:
    https://github.com/openwebwork/webwork2/blob/master/bin/newpassword