I think the friendliest signup system I’ve seen is that used by KGS (a href=http://www.gokgs.com/http://www.gokgs.com//a) . You give them a login name, then click guest to login without registering. If you decide you wish to register (which enables the site to track your statistics, maintain a log of game records, and other such user-specific features, you can. However, registration takes place AFTER you are already on their site; you register the name you just used to login as guest.
pretty similar to choosing game difficulty before even playing game;) in that that you don’t know what are you going into. whether this registration is worth.
MySQL is one of the worst sites as they want you to register to download and make it unessecarily difficult to find the free version.
in any economy, the capitalist maximizes profits. How are these restrictions any different? Hits and views are the modern day currency, registered users are like diamonds. If a website has a banner, most likely they’re trying to make money. Login data is gold to potential advertisers. Not logging in to see an API is an indication that you’re not serious. So many tools to save passwords, browsers, cookies, if you weren’t even a registered user in the first place that barrier was a brilliant idea. When a website is first launched, I think its important to move these restrictions, but as it becomes established, they can’t be bothered with the dissidents who only now want to see their stuff. the choice is yours. Coincidentally, comments are a great trap. That burning desire to be overly opinionated often leads me to register for some blog that ill never remember my username or password to. This is one of the websites i’d have registered to comment on, its great that i dont have to, though… am i logged in??
Facebook is back to prompting you for login when you click the doc link in the article. Apparently there’s a force acting in opposition.
Microsofts live.com offering has been doing this since at least the beta stage when you start personalizing your page. it issues a cookie and remembers you until you register/sign in via passport. After that connection between cookie and account auto signs you in. And to be fair and balanced in the reporting the new iGoogle also seems to have this as well.
I am sure that some smarty pants out there will point out that some other obscure site has been doing this even longer.
MClaren, While I’m not a fan of PHP, your ignorance shows through in your post when you mix up server versus client side scripting (Javascript) and PHP and browser rendering (Thats almost always handled using CSS on the client side, and using external CSS files means that the script has to return very little if not the same amount of information to the client).
You also assume that Hotmail uses PHP, when with it being a microsoft product, is more likely to be using .NET.
Now I understand how a PHP/mySQL site can be slow, but your preaching to the choir here. Its an intrepretated scripting language, if you want speed, work in .NET or JSP.
I will say that reading your ignorance laden rant brightened my morning though. I hope your not a professional web developer.
Depends on the site. Sometimes you want the brick wall (Banking, Financial). Sometimes people pay for the priviledge, for example New York Times.
For the API documentaion, maybe you have to be a Facebook partner to view the documentation (just guessing here).
If ther isd a login, there should be a good reason (business or otherwise) why it is in place.
Anyway, if your making a public site, some content/actions should be viewable without logging in to allow casual users to experience the website. If they want more, have them create an account. All they need is an ID and password so they can login at a later date.
You could just use there email as there ID, but if your storing the email in a cookie, then all you would have to do is replace the email address with the person’s email to impersonate them, so maybe challenge response is better.
I came across this same thing a few weeks back when we accidently put Twiddla live. In the morning, we required a simple username+password+email(optional) to try the thing out, and were getting plenty of people trying it out. In the afternoon, I pushed a new build that didn’t require an account to demo the app. There was an immediate 4X spike in traffic into the application itself.
Certainly sold me. Graphs and a writeup of that experience can be found here:
http://twiddla.blogspot.com/2007/04/1000-signups-on-day-one.html