11 ..in hell, brother.

Now I know this community wasn’t designed for me, so I’m not coming back to read your equally stupid replies. Just thought I’d pop in and disrupt the order – or what’s it called? See you..

posted at 05:57 pm on April 4, 2006 by Daniel jaspoid

12 Excellent article

Great article that mirrors my own experiences with anonymity/registration which governs the way I mold the sites I design now.

As far as multi-website logins such as SXIP, that has been tried with mixed success. Microsoft’s Passport was useful but I only found myself using them on Microsoft sites rather than binding it to also be used for eBay and such. In my eyes, they are only useful when used with a similar set of sites such as perhaps a common login for the popular web technology blogs/magazines. The DECK sites perhaps?

posted at 07:48 pm on April 4, 2006 by Andy Kant

13 Stand by your comments

Useful, thoughtful article. I’ve always thought that:

(a) posting anonymously is pointless when you can easily sign up for most discussions with any old username, and
(b) if you can’t stand by your comment you shouldn’t bother making it in the first place.

martium
(aka Martin Young)

posted at 11:18 pm on April 4, 2006 by Martin Young

14 On usernames and communities...

How convenient. I don’t really remember ALA having a login system before this article and I swear I’ve posted before. But maybe I’m confusing it with another website. :)

Two things that I though while reading this article:

On usernames, I like using my e-mail address as username because I never forget what my username is. If I come up with a username like Edmundo, even if it’s a uncommon name, it’s usually taken. So then I have to come up with an alternative, but when I come back to the site I can’t rememember my username anymore, so I always try logging in with edmundo.

On communities, I do agree that you need to encourage users to join in and participate as part of the community. There is a sense of respect and in know that other human beings exists that also post on the web. I never feel like Wikipedia was maintained by people, unless it’s something so obscure that I wonder who contributed to it. I know that there’s a group of people building portals and stuff, yet I have no will to join and collaborate, even though I’m a major fan of the website.

posted at 02:30 am on April 5, 2006 by Edmundo Ruiz

15 Untitled

I both agree and disagree with the writeup.

Normally, I’m very strongly anti-registration, but John makes quite a few great points about streamlining the process.

On this site, for example, I can fill out every field in a few seconds – I hate email validation, because it multiplies the time it takes me to register, and is simply an annoying, painful process that usually leaves me at the homepage of a site trying to figure out how to navigate back to where I was –

and I just wanted to make one post! In those instances, I’ll simply leave rather then participate. I’ve abandoned other forum users when I knew exactly how to solve their problem simply because the registration system for the system made me so angry.

Many registration systems will find some hiccup or something they dislike no matter how exactly I type up the information. Then, they force me to rewrite half of it (at least the password and repeat password) before I can ressubmit.

As for terms of use – I haven’t read one since I was a kid and did silly, stupid things like reading terms of use! Seven minutes times the number of products or services I’ve used would come out to several thousand.

At any rate, I don’t think most designers reading this will get the correct message: Make a registration process, but no-one wants to sit through crap they don’t need, so make it doable in thirty seconds or less.

posted at 04:34 am on April 5, 2006 by Steven ---------

16 It's about trust

Ironically, I just signed up as a member of this site with a nickname, and they’re posting my comment here under my real name. Anyway, I won’t try to make a long comment because I just blogged about this article here (please check out my research blog on blogging!).

I agree with Grohol in that online communication, be it under the guise of an alias or not, is that whatever content exists in a community can be trusted (as well as its members).

The kicker with the Wikipedia snafu was that once it caught on as a reliable source, important people tried to usurp certain pieces of content and render it acceptable to their needs, and in turned applied censorship to an open-source project, thereby abusing everyone else’s privilege to accessing transparent, all-inclusive information. Wikipedia was also at fault because it didn’t establish any prompts for user integrity at the time — a simple request for accountability, such as an e-mail address could have prevented the problem from ballooning — and instead they chose to close off a chunk of IP addresses. Not cool.

I think we still have a ways to go in ensuring wholesome, viable and sustainable online communities. Eventually, I think, as the Web grows ever more intertwined, and users become more demanding of the technology, who we are IS going to matter, especially when we’re increasingly encountering the exact same identities on Wikipedia, on A List Apart, on MySpace, on Flickr, in Cocomment, World of Warcraft, Sxip, Sxore, etc… You see what I mean?

For now I believe, honesty is still the best policy and it’s best to give the writer benefit of the doubt.

posted at 11:20 am on April 5, 2006 by debbie s

17

The less you require from your users, the more likely they are to trust you when you do need other information from them. I really like the idea of making the “initial registration” as simple as possible. Let’s take IMDB for example. Recently, they began requiring users to be registered to even read comments on their forum section. On the registration form, they require a valid email address, gender, and country and zip code. What is it that I think of when I see this? Clearly their registration isn’t about community—it’s about marketing. They want to advertise products to me.

But what if they just required a name, an email address, and a password? No confirmation email, no nothing. What happens? I’m more likely to register and participate in their community making it a stronger community.

To get more than the simplest of details out of people, you need to provide some value for them. Requesting information so you can sling more ads in their face is hardly incentive.

posted at 12:54 pm on April 5, 2006 by Brian Crescimanno

18 Is it JUST about anonymity?

I believe you will only convince users to sign up to something if you offer things over and above what non-members are given.

Brian raises a good point about slinging ads at people – is this “fair use” of the captured data as required by the Data Protection laws of your given country (if applicable) or are you using data for purposes other than what it was collected for?

posted at 01:19 pm on April 5, 2006 by Mike R

20 Untitled

Did you know the biggest and most popular internet forum in the world by a wide margin, 2channel (http://www.2ch.net/), has no user accounts, no registration, and posting without a name at all is the preferred method of posting? It’s has its share of trolling and stupidity, yet it remains massively popular throughout all levels of Japanese society, and its internal society is immensely strong, enough that the organized efforts of its users will often be big enough to get into the news?

This article fails to address any of that, and it also fails to address any of the points raised in here: http://wakaba.c3.cx/shii/shiichan.html – Especially the point that anyone who wants to cause trouble in an online society ca do this as easily with pseudonymity as with anonymity. The people who care about their online identity’s reputation are those people who want to fit in in the first place, and will behave well in either case. Those who want to cause trouble don’t care, and can create as many identities as they need for this.

posted at 05:19 pm on April 5, 2006 by A. Nonymous