Forced login

Wed Apr 28 19:39:45 GMT 2004 Forced login

I'm seeing more and more sites that require a login to access inner pages. I don't know about you, but I've got to want to read that page very badly indeed to go through the trouble of registering with them. It's not a matter of cost - most of these are free. It's the extra time and effort, not to mention giving out personal information to one more place. No thanks, I'll just click back to Google and find a page that has what I want without making me login.

There are sites I will register for: The New York Times site, Mac OS X hints, a few others. But in general, forced registration will just send me somewhere else very, very quickly. Do these folks not understand that, or is it that they really think their content is so unusual that I cannot find equal quality somewhere else?

I think the teaser sites are the most annoying - the ones that give you part of an article and then hit you with the registration page when you click for the next page. They may think this is "give 'em a taste and they'll buy", but all it makes me suspect is packing the good apples at the top of the barrel.

And then we have the ones that let you access X number of pages per day, and then they make you "join". I suppose that's a little better, but it still doesn't make me happy, and I won't put links to those sites unless there really is no other place to reference. Frankly, I wish Google wouldn't even index them, but I suppose they have to or get tricked into it - Google spiders probably don't get requests to register.

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