You didn't sign up for that abuse

Jared Spool nails it again with his case study on poor login/register user experience: The Sign-In Travesty.

The thing is, the example he cites is far from the worst you'd find on the Web. CollegeBoard.com pulls out all the usual tricks to allow people to log in, sign up for a new account, fetch forgotten passwords or even lost user IDs.

The user experience for authentication on the example site is so common it's practically a standard. So Spool's showing us that many thousands of sites using similar routines have the same flaws. Read it, and see your site(s) in it, because they probably are.