Three faults, all on the same screen, all only visible once passwords
were actually turned off — which until now nobody had done on a live
instance.
wp-login.php runs wp_signon() on its way to drawing the form, even for a
plain GET. Core tolerates that by discarding the result, but only when
the error codes are exactly the pair its own password filters produce.
Removing those filters is the whole point of turning passwords off, so
what was left behind was the generic authentication_failed — printed, in
red, above a form with no username and no password, on a site that has
neither. Every visitor was told their sign-in had failed before they
tried.
The paste-a-signature path had no way to submit. It borrowed core's
login button, and the stylesheet that retires the password form hid that
button too. The one route for people whose keys live on another machine
— sign in Electron Cash, paste the result — was therefore broken exactly
on the sites most committed to not having passwords. It now carries its
own plain submit button, so it also works on the screens where there is
no core login form to borrow from, and with JavaScript off.
And the username field outlived the password field, although
authenticate() never reads it either. "Username or Email Address" sat at
the top of a wallet login form: the one thing this fork exists to
remove, in the first place anyone looks. Both go now, with their
required attributes cleared, because a hidden required field does not
fail quietly — it refuses the submit and points an error bubble at a
control nobody can see.
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