Simplify Free Content with BugMeNot

This is hardly breaking news–BugMeNot has been around for a while–but literally every day I talk to people who still register for free content online, and who then complain that their e-mail gets filled up with unwanted news about updates, special offers, and the like.  (Note to self: Um, find better things to talk about with people.) Or they’ll click a link, but not read the article, because registration’s required.

There is a better way!

Numerous websites, often, but not exclusively, newspapers and magazines, still offer free content online but require you to register to read it.  On the one hand, this a pretty minor nuisance.  But, on the other, it’s yet another login to remember.  And then they’ve got your contact information and will–no matter how many times you say “It’s not ok to contact me”–eventually start sending you messages.

BugMeNot.com, founded by Guy King (of Stateless Systems, which offers a trove of helpful services), offers shared login information for such sites (The NYTimes.com info might not interest most ProfHacker readers, as anyone with a .edu account is good to go, but it’s handy to have the WashingtonPost.com and other papers available.)  Sometimes, these are joke logins set up deliberately to be shared; other times they’re accounts that someone has set up, and then realized either the site isn’t for them or that the site harvested their information for no real purpose.  When you’re confronted with a login for such a site, just click over to BugMeNot to see if there’s a login available.

BugMeNot doesn’t host logins for sites that require you to pay to view content, nor do they host logins that let you edit content (like Wikipedia).

What’s particularly nice about BugMeNot is the FireFox extension that will, when you right-click on the log-in field of any site requiring registration, check for available log-ins.  Handy!  (And if you’re the sort who likes to run FireFox from a command line via Ubiquity–and, really, who isn’t?–then there’s a BugMeNot command for that.)

BugMeNot won’t work for everything, but it is certainly worth a try the next time you want to read a newspaper article without providing your gender, age, and relative income.

Image by flickr user ceslava.com / CC licensed