Don't waste your time solving this.<p>Your "ultimate solution" will just become another on top of the "ultimate solutions" listed as the services you indicated on your post.<p>Your idea seems too narrow to address a mass-market.<p>The tools that exist are already serving niches:<p>- Bugmenot - to bypass signups where something important is needed behind the signup-wall but probably not an account you'd use for amazon.com<p>- Quick signups = social login . Most people are content to connect to sites via Google/Facebook login, which avoids the entire signup process<p>- Lastly, don't forget OpenID - it died recently and was an attempt to unify the login process. Probably exactly the use-case for you.<p>Truth be told, site-makers have signups because they can and do so because they want to capture data from users for "important" advertising, user-data-selling, etc.<p>So long as users are happy to sacrifice some data for a 'free' service, this is the model the internet will continue to thrive on and signups will continue.<p>If you want to go ahead and try to solve the problem for yourself, it may be worth it. For the average user though, this is another non-problem in their quest to use x-social-cool-new-app that requires me to just login via Facebook to so I can "share" stuff.<p>Good luck!
The #1 reason I prefer mobile apps to web apps is because even those that require sign in will remember my login permanently. The entire rest of the web (with rare exceptions) all seems to believe that it's acceptable to require re-login over and over and over. I've drastically reduced the number of sites I use just to end the madness, even with 1Password. How is this still not solved in 2015?
The author's indignation at registration systems that aren't easy to automate is confusing. I view that as a feature, not a bug.<p>Why the fuck would any service provider want to make it easy for spammers to automate mass registrations as the author seems to want?<p>It's literally the reason CAPTCHA was invented.
As a sidenote: the mention of Ireland not having postal codes led me to the wiki article: <a href="http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Postal_addresses_in_the_Republic_of_Ireland" rel="nofollow">http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Postal_addresses_in_the_Republi...</a> which goes into detail:<p>>"The introduction of a National Postcode System, known as "Eircode", is planned to take place in Summer 2015."<p>>"An Post did not introduce automated sorting machines until the 1990s. By then, the optical character recognition (OCR) systems were advanced enough to read whole addresses, as opposed to just postcodes, thereby allowing An Post to skip a generation. Consequently, mail to addresses in the rest of the state does not require any digits after the address."
I don't at all agree with the authors post.<p>Yes, sites have different flows for signup. This is not a "problem". Different sites want different things, or have different needs. Some with have Captcha, others will require CC, or what have you.<p>Yes, there are some sites that require login and are just being asshats for it. And for those, bugmenot is good.<p>But for others, there is a need for signup. And that shouldn't be swept under the rug.<p>I think a better approach could be to push for more usability and accessibility of the forms. Because thats something I am all for.
Is the author proposing an open-source tool for registration automation/scraping, which would compete with LastPass, 1Password, etc? Or open-source infrastructure that could be used by all such services?
This seems like a solution for a problem that mostly doesn't exist anymore. I rarely encounter sites that require registration merely for reading. Many newspaper sites used to do that, but now they're mostly open, or paywalled.<p>On sites where I post or buy stuff, why would I want shared accounts? Maybe I can see it for software support sites. But even there, account reputation can be important.
Aren't most website storing long-term cookies when the user check the "remember me" function? Also, I think that the most difficult part of an automatic signup system would be captchas.