You Need to Login to Protect Yourself from Your ‘Friends’ as well as your enemies

With all our RobotBooker booking systems, like many other applications, we have a Login Page. On the Internet this is a necessity because you don’t want a stranger coming along and seeing and doing whatever evil they think fit. But what about when you’re on a closed system like an Office Intranet? Do you still need to log in?

We think we know the answer to this, but one of our customers decided to ignore us and tell us to remove the login page because it was unnecessary when the only ones with access were a highly trained team of professionals. The customers used the system to book items for conformance testing and the system was hosted on a single computer outside the test area.

It wasn’t long before the first complaint. ‘Your system sucks. I made a booking and now it’s disappeared’ said one. And then over the next few weeks a few others complained that their bookings were being overwritten by someone else’s booking. Bookings mysteriously moved from one time period to another.

Luckily, we had some logging software installed on our system. These strange occurrences always seemed to happen when certain people used the system, and then their bookings always appeared in the time slot that the missing bookings were meant to be. What a coincidence.

We showed the log to the manager and he instructed that all users must log in with their own username and password. On our system you cannot move or delete someone else’s booking and once login was compulsory there were no more such incidents or complaints. Strange that.

The moral of the story is that passwords identify people. When you don’t log in and everyone is anonymous then some people tend to do want they want. Friends may be playing a prank, but it probably is more down to arrogance, believing their work is more important and higher priority than the previous users.

Friends and colleagues must still conform to rules and it’s probably best that you allow the system to impose them.