It’s a particular gripe of mine when sites make me register just to read information that I have a passing interest in. I’ve seen it twice today and it’s made me wonder how many people actually go ahead and register. First up is the Irish Independent’s website, unison, which I reached from a link on blogorrah about Oxegen 2006. I’ve come across unison before but everytime I’ve been linked to it, the site demands my details to read a story. That’s just shit, I only want to read the information, not give you my email address for the privilege.
Next up was Lance Armstrong’s site. Now I’ve been reading his book, “It’s Not About The Bike, My Journey Back to Life” for the past few weeks. In fact, I just finished reading it a few minutes ago and decided to check out his site. On the front page they have various news stories about Lance which link in to the Paceline section of his site. Guess what, you need to register just to read news about him. 🙁 It’s totally unnecessary and has immediately turned me away from the site. Site owners need to wise up and stop requiring registration to view content. There are lots of valid uses for registration, in fact I’m signed up to more forums, blogs and shopping sites than I can count but when I’m browsing it’s like a brick wall.
5 replies on “Why make me register?”
BugMeNot.com
That site is dead handy Damien. Cheers. 🙂
The reason that Unison (the Independent Group online) has registration is that they’re going to use the information as part of a study into why people will go to that much trouble to read incredibly badly written crap, even though it’s hidden behind a tortuous sign-in and a website that hasn’t evolved in 5 years.As it happens, it’s a little known fact that the Irish Independent was actually set-up as a part of a similar experiment into how much people would pay to read inarticulate opinionated shite, but they never got around to shutting it down once they had all the information they were looking for, and since then it’s kept going all by itself out of sheer bloody-mindedness. There was talk recently of having registration for the paper instead of paying for it to see if that would be a better deterent, or even setting fire to it before handing it over and then attacking the would-be reader.I signed up, but you’ll quickly discover that stuff like RSS and editions and anything remotely interesting that you can do with the technology is… not there. Much like the notion of informative journalism, which isn’t there either, and neither is punctuation. The sign-up, as I say, is a safety feature to discourage people. I actually don’t know what they use the information for, I’m pretty sure your details go into a text file, probably in /tmp/.
[…] “There are 40 million or so Poles, so it is an issue that we have to look at.” Check out my comment in reply to Anto’s story on registration in order to enter a site and view the content. Actually, I’m just going to put the comment here in it’s entirety, but remember to check out Anto’s site, I agree with him on this… […]
[…] Check out my comment in reply to Anto’s story on registration in order to enter a site and view the content. Actually, I’m just going to put the comment here in it’s entirety, but remember to check out Anto’s site, I agree with him on this… […]