I have long been skeptical of efforts to “strengthen” passwords by throwing in oddball characters — if they were serious, they’d allow us to use dîacritiçal märkß and such — but the system has problems at a more fundamental level:
I have difficulty remembering what the username and passwords are anyway. As soon as I finally hit the jackpot, I go into the accounts section and change the username to something I am going to remember. Then I go to change the password, knowing that the old password didn’t meet requirements anyway.
Well, okay. I can see that. But:
The problem is that because my old password didn’t meet requirements, they wouldn’t let me change to a new password. I get logged off, and then it won’t let me log back in because the password doesn’t meet the new requirements. Not that the password is wrong, mind you. And nevermind that it let me log into the password a half-hour before.
An awful lot of tomfoolery for something that can’t save you anyway.