Monday Minutes: Password Expirations

by Kelly McElligott on Dec 26, 2022

In this week's Monday Minutes, Kelly and Jessie talk about another feature in Koha 22.05, adding password expirations to patrons by patron category.

This feature will allow a library to define the number of days that the patron category can use their password before having to change it.

System Preferences

With this feature, there are a few things that need to be considered. If you would like your patrons (or at least one patron category) to be able to reset their password, then consider this:

System Preference, EnableExpiredPasswordReset, is introduced in this release as well, which would allow the library to give/don't give the ability for patrons to directly reset their password when it is expired. If not enabled patrons must either use the 'Forgot your password' feature or have staff reset their password. *See below on how to manually send a "password reset email".

System Preference, OpacResetPassword, is also a system preference that can be enabled or not enabled to allow patrons to reset their password.

Patron Category

This feature will allow a library to define the number of days that the patron category can use their password before having to change it.

In the Administration Module- under Patron Categories- choosing a specific patron category will reveal a new field to apply a number of days.

As with any change to a specific patron category, to apply this change to all your existing patrons within this patron category, an update needs to be applied. If your library adds a 'Password Expiration" period here, please submit a ticket to ByWater to update your patrons.

Manually Send Password Reset

From the patron's account, staff can manually send a password reset email to the patron at any time. This option will be under the "More" dropdown from a patron's account.

Expiration

Once a patron's password does expire, they will get a message as they are logging into the staff interface or the OPAC. This message will be clickable and bring the user to the OPAC to reset their password. The patron will need to know their username and old password.

Super Librarians

The password expiration date on a patron's account can only be seen if the staff member is a super librarian. A staff member that is not a super librarian will not see the password expiration date on the patron's account.