Shared moodle accounts..Roses and Thorns

One of our moodle sites uses shared accounts.  Specifically, we set up accounts for school districts that are shared by administrators from that district.

The roses:

1 - you do not need many accounts to provide access to *many people from the same district
2 - fewer accounts to enroll into a course

The thorns: (which I might add, are never as obvious up front as the roses)

1 - passwords can not be reset, since the email used on the shared accounts are bogus
2 - emails cannot be sent to a specific user of the account, since it does not belong to a specific user.
3 - did I already say that passwords cannot be reset?

When a person cannot log into the site, usually they forgot their password, I like to say to them, "you can initiate a password reset by clicking on the login button and following the Forgot Password link".  I cannot say this to users of shared accounts.

If the owner of an account wants me to reset their password, even after gently reminding them about the password reset just mentioned, I can do that, since its a single owner...see where I am going with this?

The shared accounts? Well, I can't or should not reset the password because others may be using it.  Since moodle is so good at hiding passwords, even from the administrator of the moodle and the DB, I cannot tell the user of the shared account what the password is.  My hands are a little tied.

Moral of the story?

Do not use shared accounts, their benefits are out weighted by their thorniness.