The Dayton Daily News wants you to register with them if you're going to read their stories. That's a bit of a pain, but completely understandable. It's how they go about it that's simply infuriating. The system they have is completely bass-ackwards.

When you click on a story link and you're not logged in you're redirected to a screen with a registration form and a link off to the side directing you to another page if you've been there before and already registered. This SHOULD NOT BE! The users should be redirected to the login screen and presented with a link to the registration screen they need to use if they have an account.

The majority of users who go to view a story there are likely to have been there before and to already have an account. Forcing the majority of your users, and especially the dedicated ones that come back again and again, to waste their time and effort to click a link and load another page every time they log in is just unacceptable. It's bad practice. What's worse, they just redid the registration page and it's still the same damn thing.

I tried pointing this out to them a while back in an e-mail and they were quite obtuse about it. It boiled down to "Thank you for contacting us. We have a link to the login page on the registration form."

I visit their site daily and every damn day I have to see that registration page and click the link to log in. It's a waste of my time and the time of every person who visits their site more than once.