This is obvious but bears repeating. I still silently curse every site that makes this mistake.<p>I've done my part to fix it, by the way. Here's the introduction to Section 6.5 in my book <i>RailsSpace</i>:<p>6.5 Friendly URL forwarding<p>There’s one final flourish we’d like to add to our basic login functionality. One of our
pet peeves is when we go to the front page of a site, click on a link for a protected
page, are prompted to log in, and then get forwarded back to the front page rather than
to the protected page we originally requested. This is lame, lame, lame. Obviously, the
site should remember the protected page we requested and then forward us <i>there</i> after
logging in. Let’s implement (and test) this feature, which we call “friendly forwarding.”