

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

i read hacker news daily.  i found an interesting article and wanted to comment on it, but didn&#x27;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.<p>i don&#x27;t think this is stupidity on my part either.  i assumed the &quot;submit&quot; button would require me to log in, so i skipped it.  after all, i thought, every website has a dedicated signup form.  it&#x27;s gotta be somewhere.<p>from a UX perspective, it&#x27;s silly to put the signup form behind a button that people will assume is unusable without an account.<p>yeah, this is a totally inconsequential thing, but it&#x27;s a 5-minute fix, too.  why not just make the login button a login&#x2F;signup button?  am i missing something?
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patio11
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.

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samstave
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?

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

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kgermino
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?

~~~
pg
Yes, it worked quite well.

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

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alphamethyl
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.

~~~
dgunn
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.

