Half Width Characters

You enter a perfectly valid password with letters and numbers, meeting all their ridiculous requirements. But wait—the form rejects it because you used "ineligible characters." The kicker? You need to use "half-width roman characters."

For those lucky enough to have never encountered this nightmare: half-width vs full-width characters are a thing in Japanese and other East Asian text systems. Full-width characters take up more space (think ａ vs a). Some legacy systems or poorly designed forms throw a fit if you accidentally use the wrong width, even though they look nearly identical.

Instead of, you know, just normalizing the input on the backend like a sane developer, they decided to make it YOUR problem. Because why make UX better when you can just confuse users with error messages that sound like they're written in ancient riddles? Classic enterprise move right there.