Free Registration

March 16th, 2006 by Potato

I’m really sick of just about every site on the internet requiring free registration to do anything. Newspapers, podcasts, forums… what’s the point? They often say they won’t sell the information you give them, and that their “newsletters” are strictly opt-in (even if the checkbox does default to on). If that’s true, why bother? If you’re not selling the information, why not just let people surf the site without the annoying “register now!” requests, and just let those few who are actually interested in your newsletter sign up for it on their own? So knowing that they’re selling our information to spammers, we sign up with free throw-away addresses. Knowing that the addresses are useless, why bother with the forced registration?

Today was pretty bad. I decided to turn on the Penn Jilette Radio Show because I’ve heard some good things about it. And before it would let me listen to the broadcast, I had to fill out my name, email address, zip code, whether I had any hiring priviledges at my company, and how many people worked there. So I tried to put as little info in there as possible, and every time it would spit it back to me asking for more, and delete what I already had, so I had to do it all over… so annoying.

So for anyone that doesn’t already know about it, I’m going to plug BugMeNot. It’s great particularly for newspaper sites that require you to register before they let you read the articles. That can get really annoying, especially if it’s the kind where you have to wait for the email activation code to come, and by the time it does you forgot what story it was you wanted to read about.

And finally, since I can’t think of enough to pad this out to a full post (well, I can, but no one needs to know about my unnatural proclivity for staying in bed as long as humanly possible), here are some unusual alarm clocks.

One Response to “Free Registration”

  1. Ben Says:

    I was just on a site like that today. It was an mp3 selling site, but before I could even browse their catalogue of music they wanted me to sign-up through their “easy 3 step process”. Screw that, I’m not wasting my time to possibly find out they have absolutely nothing I want!