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Why Amazon and FTP passwords can’t be shown as plain text

We star out passwords because it prevents “shoulder-surfers” (people looking over your shoulder) from seeing the password.

Three quick, different ways that you can access your stored passwords are:

  1. Press “View Source” in your web browser, and read it out of there.
  2. Download a backup of the site’s database and read it out of there.
  3. Install an extension in your web browser to un-star all passwords.

If you want to display passwords directly, then do this:

  1. Using FTP (or equivalent) access to your web hosting space, create (if it does not already exist) a folder called mu-plugins in the content directory of your WordPress install (which is usually called wp-content – i.e. the new directory will be wp-content/mu-plugins).
  2. In that folder, create a new file called ud-star-passwords.php (or anything else ending in .php) with the following content:
<?php
add_filter('updraftplus_admin_secret_field_type', 'updraftplus_admin_secret_field_type');
function updraftplus_admin_secret_field_type($type) { return 'text'; }