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Choosing a Control Center username or password

If you are self-registering as a new Control Center user, changing your Control Center password, or if you're a system administrator who's creating user profiles for new users, you might have tried a few usernames and/or passwords without success. Follow the guidelines below for selecting usernames and passwords.

Control Center usernames

For usernames, these three things are helpful to know:

 

  • usernames must be at least 8 characters long
  • usernames can contain letters or numbers
  • usernames should not contain special characters like $, !, %, etc. (but @ and . are allowed—to accommodate an email address)
     

If you enter a name and get a user already exists message, it means someone in our database has already reserved that name. You'll need to try another username. For example, if johndoe doesn’t work, try johndoe12 instead.

 

When you delete a user manually, the username remains unavailable for 30 days. After 30 days, you (or someone else) can reuse that username. Usernames are automatically deleted from Control Center after 12 months of inactivity. These usernames are available immediately after they are deleted.

Control Center passwords

When you're creating a Control Center password, your password must be at least 12 characters long (up to 128 characters) and meet the following requirements:

 

  • cannot reuse any of the past 5 passwords

 

  • password cannot contain spaces
     

  • password must contain at least three of the following:
     

    • at least one uppercase letter

    • at least one lowercase letter

    • at least one number

    • at least one special character (e.g., !, @, #, $, %, ^, &, *, (, ), {, }, [, etc.)

  • password cannot contain the words centurylink, control, level3, or lumen
     

  • password must not be same combination of 4 characters with your username

Note: If your username is not an email address, Control Center appends @control.centurylink.com to your username when it stores your information. For example, if your username is sallyjenkins, Control Center stores your username as sallyjenkins@control.centurylink.com. You don't need to sign in with the additional information, but it's important to note when you're choosing a password so that you don't duplicate character sequences in the additional information added to your username.

We encourage you to create even stronger passwords. One suggestion to create a stronger password is to write a sentence you'll remember and then use the first letter from each word in the sentence to create your password. For example, I bought a little red Corvette for $9000 in 1999 becomes IbalrCf$9i1.
 
Here are more tips:

  • don't include a complete word or series of words (weak = blueSky)
  • don't use obvious substitutions (weak = L0ok0ut)
  • don't reuse any part of an old password
     

If you forget either your username or password, you can retrieve it.