@[email protected] Please explain to the Python developer (me).

@flesh @benjojo The $ is a unix crypt hash symbol, which indicates the string that follows is an encrypted password string. If the password were to be stored in say plain text, the program to check the password might infer some things about the password that are untrue if it starts with a $ and always error out since it's comparing what it thinks is a hash to a plaintext of the password, and they don't match. One might reasonably assume from this that this restriction is in place because they do indeed save the passwords as plain text...