This is the advise that Invisionfree (the forum provider) give people to stop their forums getting hacked. I thought it was pretty good so I'll post it here:
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Passwords should be:
* at least 7-8 characters long — longer is better
* composed of three of these character classes:
1. lower-case letters: abcd...
2. upper-case letters: ABCD...
3. numeric: 1234...
4. non-alphanumeric: !@#$<,"...
If your password is so complex that you need to write it down, choose another one.
What's a poor password?
An easily cracked password has one or more of the following characteristics. Do not use any of the following in your password:
- a password that you have shared with someone else.
- a dictionary word
If you can find it in a dictionary of any language, don't use it. Attackers trying to break into a system use computer programs that sniff out poor passwords. One of the first things that these programs do is try dictionary words — and they have access to dictionaries for all sorts of languages, so don't think you're safe by using German, Akkadian, or Farsi;
- your name or the name of your spouse, child, pet, boss or anyone.
Do not use names in any form;
- your character username.
- anything that can be found out about you
The street or city where you live, your birthday, license plate number, your social security number, your phone number, the first line of your favorite song, your favorite quotation, etc.;
- anyone's birthday;
- movie or song titles;
- password composed of all digits or all letters;
- dictionary words in which the letter "l" has been replaced with the number "1", or "E" with "3" (e.g. e1ephant or 3l3phant);
- a word to which a single digit has been appended or prepended (e.g. bookworm5 or 5bookworm);
- clever-seeming "magic words" from computer games (e.g. xyzzy);
- simple keyboard patterns like qwerty;
- any of the passwords that are used as examples on this page or anywhere else;
- any of the above spelled backwards;
- passwords that are written down on a note kept under your keyboard or in your desk, or are kept in a file on your computer (including email);
- a password that has never been changed or has not been changed in several months;
- a password that you have used before.
One way of creating a good password is as follows:
Step 1
Think up some short sentence or saying that will be easy to remember, such as
"your mom smells like a wet dog".
Take out the spaces and you get:
yourmomsmellslikeawetdog.
Step 2
It's not too bad how it is, but since you don't want to get in the habit of using words that are in the dictionary or something for passwords, you can change it to "leet speak" (replacing certain letters with numbers or symbols that look similar), which some people do a little differently than others, but here's how I might change our example to "leet":
y0urm0m5m31151!k34w3td0g
Step 3
That's better, but it could still be improved.
An easy way to make it more secure would be to shift everything over one key in some direction.
So, if we shift all the characters over to the left one key, it would become:
t9yen9n4n2``4`~j23q2rs9f
Like offer similar items in collector weapon skins or something.
