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Apr 12

Thoughts on Registration

Posted by Sandro Paganotti in Ruby on Rails - comments are closed digg this add to delicious

In this week I faced the problem of creating a registration procedure for a new service we’re going to release soon. I tried to wrote down all of the features a professional and web 2.0 compliant registration form must have, then I summarized this features in a list I’m going to share with you hoping you’ll find it useful.

  • Need to be fast:
    It’s a crucial point. You need to ask as few informations as possible and let the user complete his profile after his first log-in. This is because a lot of times I found myself bored by the quantity of fields I need to fill to obtain a username and I don’t want users gave up while registering to my service.
  • E-mail confirmation:
    Ask for an e-mail address during the registration procedure and send an acconunt-confirmation e-mail to that address. Doing this way the user has to put much attention on the data he is putting in your fields and you can also do a little spam prevention ( that will be enforced with the next point ).
  • Use logic Captcha:
    I don’t like captcha, I don’t like to have to demonstrate I’m human, in the future I hope we will find a way to recognize bot registrations in a painless way ( there is already something moving in this directon ) but for now the best I found is to use logic captcha like BrainBuster, a Rails plugin that works very well.

Well that’s all for now, I’m now thinking on the best way to implement a payment system… but that’s another part of the story :)

Sandro.

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Comments

  • Giovanni

    Posted on April 13

    Logic captcha is not that bad, at least much better than some "traditional" captcha with TOO MANY colors/deformations/stripes/... But the main point is: why don't write some kind of logical questions in the page? A spambot should pass the Touring test to give the correct answer ;) [It's just an idea :)]

  • Sandro

    Posted on April 14

    Yep, you've just described the BrainBuster logic captcha mentioned in the article above :)

  • Nick Kellet

    Posted on April 17

    Your comment reminded me of a post I read by Guy Kawasaki about not making people register up front. First time I read it I didn't agree, but now I do. It's a function of 2.0 overload - so many sites and login to remember. I look at look at Whatali.st - nice look. I'm new to ruby but having fun on developing a Web 2.0 app (which was how I found you) Here's the link to Guy's article. It changed my mind on a few things. Brain Buster is neat. Your login page is cooly stark - minimalistic. http://blog.guykawasaki.com/2007/01/the_top_ten_stu.html

  • Sandro

    Posted on April 17

    Thank you Nick for your comment, I'm reading the Guy's article right by now and I'm finding it really usefull and well-made :-) I'm glad you like our projects!

  • Giovanni

    Posted on April 17

    i wrote Touring instead of Turing.... BRRRR..... my fault! anyway this morning i had to re-type 4 .... FOUR!! .. times the alice.it captcha because of some pink spots... it was impossible to read. @Nick: i don't think a kind of fuzzy-captcha is a good idea.. you'll increase the probability to guess it :-/ @Sandro: yes it is, but the problem is ... HOW TO GENERATE THOSE QUESTIONS?? Somebody can pay a person to solve 10000000 and then train a bot to give the correct answers :(

  • Pavan Agrawal

    Posted on April 24

    Hi it good but, salted login generation should give the method that how can we include ... role based authentication.

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