• About the project
• Where did the name "Oplop" come from (i.e., I hate the name, why do you stick with it?)
• Nickname usage
• What should I do when the account password created with the nickname I want to use doesn't mean some password constraint forced upon me by a website?
• Why don't you default to a website's domain name as a nickname?

About the project

Where did the name "Oplop" come from (i.e., I hate the name, why do you stick with it?)

Oplop is actually an acronym for "One Password [equals] Lots Of Passwords".

Multiple people over the years have told me they hate the name. Well, when I created the project I needed a name for the project and all the ones I was coming up with were already taken (there are a lot of password-related projects out there!). So when I came up with the name "Oplop" and found out no one else has used it I decided to go with it. At this point there are enough users to warrant not changing it no matter how many people hate it.

Nickname usage

What should I do when the account password created with the nickname I want to use doesn't mean some password constraint forced upon me by a website?

There are two options to this. One is to prepend or append whatever characters are necessary to meet the restriction. Typically this comes up when some non-alphanumeric character is required, e.g., one of !@#$%^&*(). So you can prepend a # or something. Oplop does not add one of these by default since usage as shown that enough website prevent usage of those characters to make it a wash in terms of worth having the feature.

The other option is to change the case of the characters in the nickname. For instance, if Amazon didn't work, try something like amazon, or AMAZON and see if that fixes the problem.

Why don't you default to a website's domain name as a nickname?

There are two reasons for this, one for security and another for practicality.

The security reason is it would make people's nicknames dead-obvious. Everyone likes the simple route when presented to them, and if Oplop automatically suggested, e.g., amazon.com for your Amazon account, almost everyone would use it. By not doing this automatically there is at least a chance people will try to use nicknames that are a little less obvious. While this is not strictly a critical security problem (Oplop's core security mechanism is still tied into how well you guard your master password), it doesn't hurt to try to promote unique nickname use.

As for the practical reasons, what if you went to a website that did hosting for multiple websites under the same domain name, e.g., example.com/~spam vs. example.com/~bacon? While this is not as popular as it once was (think Geocities back in the late 1990s), this still comes up in places such as universities that provide free accounts for students. In this instance, what should the nickname be for the two different websites under the same domain? Since you should never reuse nicknames having a default would defeat that.