During the T-Mac ordeal, I "fake" registered for a LOT of news websites. The only way to get news on many of them was to register, so I just put in bull**** and registered. But, now the Chron is requiring registration to read ANY article. They used to have the occassional subscription service article, but every story requiring registration is annoying as hell. I remember I used to go to channel 11's website on occassion because they posted clips from their shows. Then, they began requiring registration. My personal suggestion to anyone and everyone is to cram their database full of fake names and email addresses. Hopefully, eventually, they will get the message.
Has that started already? It's not asking me to register at all. Up top it says: You are not logged in... Login / Sign-up Logout | Edit Account But I can still access the articles.
I think they make you register based upon how many articles you read on the site. Clear your cookies before going to chron.com and you should be okay.
I thought it was just screwed up. I signed up once and then the site would sporadically prompt me to sign-in for various pages I wanted to look at while not others on several occassions over several days. Each time...I would try to sign in and it would come back with some error. After trying in vain to sign in on several page viewing attempts with a valid user/password after all of the pages started asking me to sign-in, I requested a new activation link be sent to my e-mail. The, after activating the link, the sign-in worked and I haven't had to sign in again since. That was pissing me off, though. Why did I have to go through all that wasted time and bullcrap again? I don't know.
You know, I think you are right. I cleared my history last night and now it is working fine. I bet they have a limit and I had like 10 days in my history folder. Thanks!
they have this one site called BugMeNot and it can give you usernames for a bunch stuff, I first learned of it from here. They also have a Firefox plugin, it's pretty useful http://www.bugmenot.com/
That's a cool site KaiSeR SoZe. I'll probably get some use out of it. I get extremely annoyed by all these registration mandates - (of course, I was on the internet before there was a single advertising banner put up - so I can still remember the good old days before the internet started getting devoured by money grubbers ). One of my favorite things to do is to put in a fake email address using either the offending websites own server (i.e. "ilovespambitch@chron.com") or use the server address of another equally annoying webpage ( i.e. "sendmespamnow@nytimes.com"). It's almost as much fun as using one pre-paid junk mail envelope to remail another junk mail back to the offending companies. If I get a credit card offer from Visa®, I promptly use the pre-paid envelope to send Visa® the offer I just got from Discover®, and vice versa. Sometimes I will even include an offer for a free toaster in the pre-paid envelope, but only if Visa® or Discover® act quickly because supplies are limited (I only have one toaster). I consider it a public service because, as the offer says, everyone needs a credit card, and people like to eat toast.
I don't understand the purpose of registering. My guess is that there are more fake emails and addresses in those newspapers than there are legit ones. So now they're going to mass-mail/mass-spam a bunch of bogus addresses and emails?
Unless someone out there really has an email adress that you may have made up. Then, you end up spamming that person. But yeah, I really don't understand their logic behind this either.
FYI, I am the lead producer for SavannahNOW.com, the online site to the Savannah Morning News. We are about to embark on installing registration on our site. Many newspaper sites accross the country are doing this. The reason is, is for revenue purposes. We want to track where the user goes, what pages they look at so we can target specific advertising to those pages for those demographics. It is not so much about sending out spam but more trying to offer the right things to the right people. And it is not all about advertising, it is also about offering "content" to the right people as well. Basically, getting to know your customers better. From the data I have had presented to me, the majority of those Newspaper registrations have LEGIT information. In fact well over 90%. I know it seems like a hassle to register initially, but it really isnt that big a deal. I mean we go to a doctor's office and have to fill out paperwork so the doctor will know us/history better to better serve us. Same now with newspaper registration. And keep in mind, these sites for the most part are FREE. What keeps them free is advertising. And the best way to get the best advertising dollar is via good targeted ads that can be best achieved via registration information. My two cents.
Yeah, that's pretty awesome. I like looking at how creative some of the names are. I remember using it during the McGrady trade saga for a Orlando paper and seeing the username snorelando. Kind of made me laugh.
Your guess is completely wrong. Deuce is correct. More than 90 % (in fact, more than 95 %) of all people actually (surprisingly) enter correct information in these fields. I worked for one of the largest portals in Europe with about 25 million registered users, and the data surprised me as well. I also always thought that people (like me) would just enter bogus crap (Det The Threat is probably registered at like 50 different websites around the world), but it's not like that...
My next question for SJC and Deuce would be... how did you verify the addresses, names, etc. were valid?
My company sent a lot of those people (not all, of course, but a very large sample) snail mail (e.g., with a CD with ISP software, etc.).
