Four Island

The other day, I was looking at some delicious Rails plugins when I scrolled to the bottom of the page and noticed a header containing the words "No Signup Forms". What? How is that possible? Well, for those who don't know, gradual engagement is a form of user registration that doesn't require registration forms. What? Insanity!

Actually, it makes a lot of sense. See, what you can do is let the user wander around and do their thing. When they want to do something that requires an account, you automatically generate an account for them and set a "remember_me" cookie to something like 5 years so that they are automatically logged on to their new, autogenerated account when they visit the site. Then they can modify their account settings to fit them and it's allllll goood! :P

Well, I instantly caught on to this idea because, like most Internetters, I dislike having to fill out forms. Wouldn't it be much better if we could just visit a site and do what we want without having to fill out long forms, confirm stuff and then check our email to activate the new account just so we can tell someone that $_SEVER is actually spelled $_SERVER? Yes, it would be much easier and much less annoying.

I see one problem with it, though. The whole system with the remember me cookie is very fragile. If a user clears their browsing data, switches to a new computer or is actually still frequenting that website after 5 years, their account will be lost to them as they were provided with no credentials with which they could use to log in again. I think a good thing to do would be to ask the user for their email address upon auto-generating their account. It's not like filling out a huge form and we could reassure the user that it's simply so we can remember them. Then, we can email them a welcome letter along with a random password that the user can use in case their cookies get mangled. That seems fair, right?

So, what do you, the user, think? Is entering your email address too much like having to fill out a registration form or do you think you would be okay with that? Imagine accessing a site, seeing that someone is wrong about something and clicking "Comment". A little popup appears asking for your email address, which you dutifully fill in. Your comment is then added to the post and next time you want to correct someone, you don't have to even enter your email address. Sound good? :P