DISQUS

Mathew's comments: How many does registration keep out?

  • Karoli · 1 year ago
    Back when I worked for the CNN community, we started with no registration. Anyone, anywhere could come to the site, read, and leave comments or debate the issues on the message boards. That ended the night Princess Diana was killed. For us, the question wasn't who would we keep out, but who SHOULD we keep out?

    Today things are a bit different. The LA Times, NY Times registrations are intended to be tradeoffs -- you register, they track. They track what you do and how you do it, and the tradeoff for you is reading their content free.

    I think it's a dumb way to operate, but they absolutely do need a way to track visitors that will allow them to get targeted advertising or media buys at prime rates. With the ongoing outcry over privacy, the best and safest way to gather those metrics is to force registration and subsequent logins. Unfortunately.

    The way it should work: Register to leave comments. No registration to read articles, but an interstitial ahead of the first article informing the user that cookies are used to track usage and interest.
  • mathewi · 1 year ago
    I totally agree with registration for comments, Karoli -- if you don't
    give people at least a bit of a hurdle to clear, then there's a lot
    more noise as opposed to signal. But I'm not sure the registration
    helps target people -- I assume the majority of people who fill them
    out lie anyway. Cookies and IP sniffing seem like they would work
    just fine for advertising purposes, and they are unobtrusive.
  • lucasjosh · 1 year ago
    I work in the Interactive section of the LA Times and the registration wall shouldn't go up on your first visit, instead your 8th or so. I can't control the wall but I can at least find out why it happened like this.
  • mathewi · 1 year ago
    Thanks for the comment, Lucas -- so you have a reg wall that only pops
    up after a certain number of visits? That's interesting. A good
    idea, I think. It's possible that I have followed links to the LA
    Times before and so tripped that wire without knowing it -- I know I
    clicked through to the Lazarus piece several times over a period of
    days, so maybe that did it.
  • Vocica · 1 year ago
    On my website http://www.rentacar10.ro registration was an issue since i got lots of spam. I solved that by fully removing any email anchors.