Hints and tips on choosing a good password

Choosing a good password is an important part of setting up your account. If someone breaks into your account, they could find out some personal information like your address and telephone number. They could also make orders for food on this site using your credit or debit card (but they won't be able to find out your card number or security code).

Don't use:

• passwords of fewer than six characters (we won't let you anyway)
• passwords made up entirely of numbers (e.g. phone numbers)
• simple sequences such as qwerty, letmein, welcome, hello
• your email address
• well-known quotations
• anything you would find in a dictionary (in any language or jargon), or any dictionary word slightly modified (e.g. by adding a number to the end, or changing l to 1, O to 0, E to 3 etc.)
• any name (including yours, that of a partner, parent, child, pet, literary character, famous person or place)
• any variation (e.g. backwards, or followed or preceded by a digit) of your own name, your birthday, car registration number or any other personal information

Some good suggestions:

• Include punctuation marks, such as .,!@# etc.
• Use a mix of capital and lowercase letters
• Make your password at least 8 characters long. The longer it is, the more secure it will be.
• Choose an interesting phrase, a line from a poem, or a section of song lyrics. Then use the first letter from each word to construct your password. Make sure you don't accidentally create dictionary words this way.
• It doesn't have to be short! You can use as many characters as you want, including spaces.

Example:

• Pick a phrase you're likely to remember, for example "Blue is my favourite colour"
• Take the first character from each word: Bimfc
• Add some numbers (e.g. your birth date): 20Bimfc05
• Finally, use some punctuation as well: 20Bimfc05!

You've now got a password that should be easy to remember and which is relatively secure.