Thread

Hiya,

I asked on Twitter but got no reply :-( (where are all my Twitter friends when I need them eh?) so thought I’d ask on here instead.

I’d love to hear peoples arguments both for and against allowing people to place an entry using an SAEF into a site before they have registered on the site.

Also if you agree with it then do you have any good way of taking care of assigning the entry(ies) to the user after they have registered. Also if they don’t register for a while what happens to the data that they inputted into the system?

I have a client that wants this sort of thing on their site :

1 Because their competitor has it :-(
2 Because there is a fair amount of information needed on the registration form.

In my eyes I couldn’t care less about registering first as I have to fill in all that information anyway at some point but would love to hear what other people think and any ways of working around it all.

Best wishes,

Mark

for:
- lowers the perceived barrier to using your website for the user because they can see how it works before spending all that time filling out a registration form

against:
- much harder to implement
- no really, like a *serious* pain in the ass
- good chance of users filling out the SAEF and abandoning the registration process
- good chance of users being slow about things and not having the required cookies/etc. needed to match their account with the entry from the SAEF

possible alternative:
- ask for basic registration info up front (bare minimum: username, email address, password)
- let them fill out the SAEF which will be attached to their user
- require the rest of the info you need before it goes “live” or whatever you’re doing with the entry (could be implemented by moving their user into a different group when they fill out the profile completely)

I saw your tweet but I don’t think that fits in 140 chars 😉

I don’t think it’s a good idea: unless it’s very narrowly focused (and doesn’t appear publicly anywhere) it means allowing anonymous people posting on your website. That brings up a whole can of spamming and liability issues in my opinion. Voting Nay.

I saw your tweet but I don’t think that fits in 140 chars 😉

Fits into multiple tweets though 😉

Thanks for the thoughts on this guys. Keep ‘em coming.

I personally believe too that it’s not such a good idea and even though in this instance there wouldn’t be an ideal way to programme it I’m more against it for other reasons so would love to hear anyone else’s views on this if you have any.

Best wishes,

Mark

I’ve had an idea for a site in my head for years now and I want people to be able to submit content without having to sign up at all.

Basically I wanted a site that was more or less postsecret meets digg meets hotornot. People could post information without having an account, but you had to have an account to vote this content up or down.

The reason I wanted them to be able to submit without an account is because I wanted their posts to be anonymous.

I actually wanted to go so far as to not allow posts to be done from a real account. This way there could be no cult of personality based around what any one user posts. It would just be a dropped into a moderation queue and land in a category if approved. Then the members could vote.

I gave up on the idea in the end.

Personally I can’t find that balance between members and leaving things open to the world. I get tons of comments spam (even with the bw lists). But when I turn on captcha or require membership I get 0 comments.

I can seldom be bothered to sign up for a membership ever. If you make it difficult for me to do so or require I do so before participating chances are I won’t do either. If you have a compelling enough site I’ll eventually join. I was a lurker on metafilter for like 2 years before it even occurred to me that I’d maybe want a membership someday. It was probably another 1 or 2 years before I got around to paying my $5 and signing up.

Of course in that example you could only read until you signed up.

Big Pro: You can serve ads to non-members and annoy them into signing up! Just kidding, but it is nice to no longer see many ads now that I am a member.