Ask HN: why is the signup form behind the submit button? | Hacker News Reader

Ask HN: why is the signup form behind the submit button?

4 pointsalphamethyl9 comments

i read hacker news daily. i found an interesting article and wanted to comment on it, but didn't have an account. after a few minutes of looking for a signup form, i eventually gave up and had to google how to sign up.

i don't think this is stupidity on my part either. i assumed the "submit" button would require me to log in, so i skipped it. after all, i thought, every website has a dedicated signup form. it's gotta be somewhere.

from a UX perspective, it's silly to put the signup form behind a button that people will assume is unusable without an account.

yeah, this is a totally inconsequential thing, but it's a 5-minute fix, too. why not just make the login button a login/signup button? am i missing something?

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Every action on the website, including upvoting, clicking 'reply' (to a comment), using the add-a-comment textbox, and submitting things, will ask you to either log in or sign up if you haven't done that before.

While that may be true - its completely opaque in its design.

I have been on HN for a few years - and I found an article that I needed to comment anonymously on due to it being related to an employer... I couldn’t for the life of me figure out how to create a new account and had to email HN directly.... A real person had to tell me how to create the throwaway... this could be done so much better by on of those things, what are they called when you have to answer commonly asked questions?

To foil spammers. But we have other, better methods now. So maybe we can bring back a signup link.

Out of curiosity, how effective was that move at stopping spammers? It seems really easy to program a bot to create an account on the submission page, for example.

Are spambots really that automated (and un-targeted) that a change so simple stops them?

Yes, it worked quite well.

Maybe it is because we do not want many new users who are not bright enough to navigate the website.

calling me stupid for not finding the signup button shows that you don't understand the issue. it isn't about intelligence, it's about user experience. when i want to sign up for a website, i don't try to do things that i can't do without signing up so i can then get redirected to a signup form. i look for the signup form.

the signup form should be accessible in one click from the front page. common sense.

That's interesting. I'm not sure how common it is but I sign in all the time by doing just that. I just always try to use sites immediately because they usually cause signing in (or up) to be part of the flow.

For example, I go to my bank website and click "My Account" cause that's what I want to do. It asks me to sign in, and then redirects me to my account page. I don't click sign in.

I'm not saying this makes it ok. This just made me aware of my technique for the first time and I thought it was interesting.

created: 8 days ago

How have you been, pot?

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