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Started to sign up but stopped when it asked for my email.

Yeah, we go back and forth on that. We only use it currently to send you a confirmation. You can still login immediately though. OpenID is definitely in the road map.

I suppose we could allow you to login to a more restricted account (no spamming since we do have email/sms out support) until you validate in some way.

PG's advice is right. Take down all the fences -- you have less than 20 seconds to impress the user into staying on your site.

It's an attention economy -- asking for signup/login before providing real value = squandering that attention.

For TS we're trying to decide how to make sign-up dead simple. Since we want to support alerts and such, we'd like to simply use an e-mail/pw combo so that you only have to fill out 3 fields when you sign up (email/pw/pw confirm).

Do you have a better suggestion? Should we just specify why we ask for e-mail?

Maybe it's not high if people are buying something; they may expect to give an email in that situation. But you can A/B test to see exactly how many you're losing by asking for emails.

Give them a choice: https://ourdoings.com/reg.html

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