In the case of the Washington Post, you could link to a Google News search and tell us where to go from there. I’ve done that in threads before.
My problem with signing up is that it runs counter to the way the web works.
TeaElle reads Joe Shmoe’s blog with an entry about a child outside of Peoria who has been removed from his parents custody for some bizarre reason. Bob Fobbs sends a trackback ping to Joe Shmoe’s entry, with his take on the story.
TeaElle follows the trackback link and reads Bob Fobbs’s views. Jack Wack comments intelligently on Bob’s entry with a dissenting opinion.
TeaElle reads over to check out why Jack Wack disagrees with Bob Fobbs. Wack mentions that he originally saw the story on Slashdot and drops a link.
TeaElle reads through the thread on Slashdot and sees that Mindy Pindy says “this story is local to me, here’s what our newspaper is saying today” with a link to the Peoria newspaper site.
TeaElle clicks over to the Peoria newspaper site and WHAM! big wall, she can’t read the story unless she discloses a bunch of her personal information to the people in Peoria.
Now, the Peoria Beagle isn’t charging me to read the article. They aren’t taking my personal information and using it to tailor advertising content to me (at least they aren’t right now) and even if they are, my browser can shut down their advertising anyway, and they need to be cognizant of that. Furthermore, I’m not asking to read their entire paper online everyday, I’m trying to read one article, their coverage of a local story which has gotten national attention. They have no reason to ask for any information from me. I’m less significant in the grand scheme of life at the Peoria Beagle than the guy who buys a copy of their paper every day at the same machine on the corner of Fifth and Main Streets in downtown. I live in New York. Local Peoria news pops up on my radar once every decade, if that. They don’t need to know me.
And they can’t even explain why they want my information. They just want it. They just want it and they’re going to take it store it indefinitely and maybe, just maybe, do something with it. Or maybe not. But they don’t know what they’re going to do with it. They’ll tell me later, when they do it. And they say that they won’t spam me, but they also say that the terms and conditions with which I must agree when I give them all of my information are subject to being changed and all they have to do is tell me that they’re changing them.
That means that should it become advantageous for them to do so, they can sell my information to a spammer. They can give it to the government for free for kicks. They can use it to spam me themselves. They can publish it to a list of “people outside Peoria who have accessed their website” for whatever kind of paranoiac reasons they might want to trump up.
So I can give the Beagle my name and location and e-mail address so that I can read the article. But that wouldn’t be safe. I could lie to them, but that still requires me to take the time and effort to fill out their form, and if they want to mail me a password, that won’t work. I can click away, and they’ll lose the advertiser revenue that they would’ve received from another pair of eyes seeing their article. Or I can use BugMeNot, read the article, see their crappy advertising, and we’ll all live to battle the Currently Useless But Potentially Harmful Collection of Personal Data By Organizations Which Have No Legitimate Need For It fight another day.
I know my choice.
Btw, BugMeNot users, please please please don’t just use it. If you have working username/password combos already in existence, please share them with BMN. More and more places are shutting down some of the obvious ones like “noway@example.com / notyourbusiness” that people seeded BMN with to start. Now we need to get real data in there that isn’t so obvious and less likely to get shut down.
I’m just paranoid about spam. And you know what? My refusal to hand out my e-mail address to anyone but friends and a few choice online communities means that I haven’t had ANY spam since I deleted my hotmail account back in '99.
I don’t have anything against it for itself. The reason I often won’t sign up though is that I have sometimes have a limited time to “play” online, and since I’m currently poor and have dialup, it’s too time consuming and causes my other windows to lag.
The other thing is, as some have mentioned, the increased incidences of pop ups and spam.
I second everything here about not wanting to sign up for a million sites, but I also don’t want more passwords to remember.
In the cases that bug me the poster has already given the pertinent quotes. The others just want to read the entire article, maybe to see if the quotes were taken out of context, maybe just because they want to read the whole article. Should the OP be forced to find a secondary source just to satisfy those few? And what if the primary source IS the only source? This is especially common with local news–a man bites a dog in Peoria and the Peoria Beagle is only paper that picks it up. Let’s say I am writing about a sudden surge of dog biting across the world and quote:
Most readers take this at face value but one, we’ll call him Lobsang, thinks there is more to this story. Does it go on to describe how Jones, whom I have led you to believe is part of an international ring of dog biters, actually bit the dog as a part of his fraternity hazing and is only a copycat biter? Lobsang will never know and will never triumph in the International Dog Biting Conspiracy thread because I cannot, per board rules, reprint the entire story, WILL NOT reprint it because all of the facts to not back up my thesis, and Lobsang is in too big a hurry with that life he claims to have (though as a long-time poster we know he does not really have one) to spend two minutes signing up. Fine. I guess he isn’t as sure he’s right as he claims. I have the cite and he will not make the effort to refute it so I win!
You’re confusing Lobsang with milroyj. :wally
(snickering) That, brother, was COLD!
Two reasons:
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I’m lazy and registering usually takes two minutes, which is two minutes too long, in my opinion.
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I hate keeping track of my accounts. I can use the same passwords, but that’s not what I really need to keep track of. I like to know what sites know my personal information, so I can change it if need be, or delete myself from their servers if I feel I don’t need their services anymore.
So, you get no spam except for the spam you get?
Just a side note: you’d be surprised at how many times “suck@myc*ck.com” is already taken.
I find it rude and intrusive. I drop a cookie when I see the site, doesn’t that tell you enough about me? Fuck em! I’ll google and find a source that does not hassle me in shot order.
For all your posters:
(1) Provide links that do not require signing up.
(2) Warn in advance of the link that you have to sign up.
(3) Contribute better links if you find them (after OP).
You mean what you say, but do you say what you mean?
/end Mad Hatter routine.
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This is what drives me batty. Someone posts a link, just a link! and expects everyone else to traipse over to that link without knowing what it’s a link to.
Those who post links to SDMB posts are the worst offenders. Give a relevant quote! Give the subject of the link! Give peace a chance!