Eat my Bounce Back Suckers!

One thing that drives me nutz is when a website requires you too “Register” before they will show you content. I understand if it is service that you are paying or an interactive community such a forum, but when a news website or a website that contains information they are going to give you for free anyway asks it seems pointless and annoying to me. I normally run into this when I am reading something linked from Google news or one of the RSS feeds that I check on a regular basis. And every time it drives me nutz. The biggest question I get is what do they get out of having me register? Probably just and email to spam so why would I want to do that. In most cases it is a local paper and I am only going to read the single story I was interested in, so again what does the company gain from asking me to do this pointless task?

So I do what I am going to assume 95% of people do I try to get around the registration. Many papers use a cookie to determine if you have logged in or not and if you remove the cookie the website has no clue what to do and shows you the content. This is my favorite scenario because then I add the site to my black list to not allow cookies and I can browse their content all I want. The other trick I use I think is more common I make up an email account and registration info (I did this at the grocery store too so I could get a discount card but no junk mail). I literally just type random letters into most the fields and then random letters with an @ and a dot com so it will pass the simple test they do on emails. That always makes me laugh a little because it just means every time they try to spam the people who have registered they will get a bounce back from my entry. Sometimes I do end up registering for the same site a few times over the course of months if different stories I want to read so I probably cause a lot of bounce backs. Of course a well configured server would be unaffected but I like to think it causes the company in question trouble.

There are a few sites that take it one step further and require a real email address where you have to click on a confirmation message. Again if this is content you are going to give away for free, what good does this do your firm? Your information is provided on the internet so if you are a local paper and you want to try to get subscriptions up it doesn’t help. Again I can only assume the idea is to get emails to sell to marketers or to spam the people who register themselves. So in this case I normally either don’t bother with the site at all, find a log in on line (I am not the only person who doesn’t want to register for sites so sometime you can find a generic one posted that a lot of people use), or go create a hotmail, yahoo, or google mail account for the one use. So I have been noticing less of these sites in the last couple of years and I hope the trend is to get rid of the registration just to view an article or information. But until then I guess I will just keep circumventing the process as much as possible.