Recently I ran into a situation where I had to change the username and password that Contribute uses for the SFTP operations.

I don’t have my stuff setup to use individual SFTP logins, since I am doing away with direct shell access to the webroot and dislike manually updating permissions for people.

I found out that there is a hidden password policy in the Contribute Publishing System with regards to what it will pass as the SFTP password.

I tend to use mixed-case as well as punctuation and numbers in my passwords. When I put the new password in, the system seemed to take it. Unfortunately, this was only an appearance, since it borked when I closed Contribute and opened it back up.

Apparently it doesn’t like the use of an ampersand in the password. And since the password is stored in an unusual encryption scheme I was unable to recover from this without recreating my entire connection to the particular webserver I was managing.

Stay tuned for a post on the steps to recreate the connection without losing all you data, as well as a utility to help in case of problems.