Tease the Preview

You weren’t expecting to have to log in to this site — you clicked on a link someone shared on social media, and it has an Open Graph preview with a title and summary and everything, and the first page of text loads. But when you start to scroll down it displays a modal popup which prevents you from reading further until you log in. You consider for a second: this website is some local TV news station for a city on the other side of the country. What the heck, what’s one more password? Or maybe you just close the tab without reading the article.

Whatever the excuse, when something is linked in a public context and especially if it presents itself as readable without further action, being unexpectedly asked to jump through some hoops in order to continue is frustrating, if not downright rude.

I expect this entry in Login Bingo to be controversial: it’s not really about logging in, it’s about having to have an account in the first place or it’s not an anti-pattern, it’s our business model. Let me be perfectly clear: You are deceiving people, and attempting to justify it. This is an anti-pattern about logging in — deceiving people through entries making the content available to search engines, deceiving them by letting them start reading before telling them they can’t — deception is a whole class of anti-pattern.

Personally, when I encounter a website that does this, I add it to a list which my browser uses to both provide a visual warning in search results, and upon going to the site’s domain, first display a message: this website will prompt you to login: continue?

I get it: businesses writing things for the web hope to make money by doing so, and juicing their numbers by requiring people to create an account so they can better track and sell information about that person is one way to make money.

But if you lure me in under false pretenses and demand I create an account before you’ve proven it’s worth it to me? The answer is no: you’ve deceived me once, so shame on you. I’m not giving you a second chance, not with so wide a web out there, and I know I’m not the only one.