New York Times Shuts Itself Off From The World
from the whoops dept
Over the years, we've pointed out many, many times why requiring registration to view online news sites is a bad idea. It limits (by a long shot) how much traffic you actually get in an age where traffic is everything. Some newspapers claim that the registration data lets them sell higher ad rates, but the amount of fake or "dirty data" these registration systems gets makes that data basically useless. While it may trick some advertisers into paying more in the short term, that's hardly a sustainable business model. Then, of course, there's one other problem with newspaper registration systems. If your registration system goes down completely, you're in trouble. The NY Times seems to have experienced this earlier today. No matter what article you tried to read on their site, the NY Times kicked you right out, because their registration system was apparently all screwed up. It popped up a message to everyone (and we had a bunch of folks test this out from various locations): "We're sorry, but we are temporarily experiencing an authorization server error. Our systems administrators have been notified and are working to fix the problem. Please click here to continue logging in. We regret the inconvenience." Well, sure, it's inconvenient for us, but that seems like an awful lot of completely lost traffic for the NY Times from people who just wanted to read some of their articles (and see some of their ads). They eventually did fix this bug, but it's difficult to see what exactly is the benefit for the NY Times to have a system that might do this every once in a while.
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Solution for me, not them.
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Everyone uses. This whole registration crap is stupid, I totally agree. Which is why I'm either on yahoo news or news.google.com
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Re:
I always take the approach that no doubt another site will have the same information within easy reach
Thanks to all those who posted bugmenot - looks great and a way around this annoyance ;0)
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registrations are annoying but...
(However, the fact that its just really annoying seems valid enough to me).
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Re: registrations are annoying but...
Same as ever was. Which newspaper company is a paragon of Internet virtue?
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Re: registrations are annoying but...
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Really?
Funny, the world shut out the New York Times a while ago if I recall.
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Bugmenot
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well actually...
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postersubj
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Why do they even bother?
What does annoy me though is when people go and post on boards etc. with bug me not accounts. But I won't rant
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This is what usually happens...
Sony
RIAA
MPAA
and the list goes on and on....
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bugmenot
pass: bugmenot
...dirty.
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They can't read those old articles
....ok, i'll just get me hat....
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peace at last
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Surprise?
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Software Development
After reading your piece on software development still being stuck in "suck" mode, this piece rings out as a great example of software development still SUCKING. Not just because of the registration feature and the political aspect which you are deliving into, but just because it shows that little TESTING was done on the NYT site as a SYSTEM and not a site.
What I mean is, sure, they probably had and have people devoted to testing the web site and its content, and they made sure the registration fees work. But clearly, they didn't test to see how the web site worked if the registration system went down. If they did, they could have had a "default" condition of letting users IN to the articles during registration downtime, rather than the other way around.
Of course it's possible they *DID* test and realized that to "add" a check for registration-server availability would have been an additional FEATURE to add, and they just chose not to include it and to go live without it.
In such a case, perhaps that relieves the guilt of the software TESTERS, but it doesn't let the DEVELOPERS (which I define as project-manager level software developers, and not just code monkeys) off the hook.
For software development to really work, you need to have the bugs -- especially SYSTEM-level bugs that involve the interaction of multiple sites, servers, etc. -- ironed out well before any of the code monkeys even touch the software.
Clearly, the NYT site's registration-server bug is a great example of the premise that is geared toward fixing bugs EARLY in the development process. Clearly no one at NYT thought it important to include the IDEA of registration-server availability-checking in the process. If the "bug" had been found in the requirements gathering phase of the project, it could have been included in the design, coded during the creation of the site, well-tested during stages of production and as the site went live.
But yes, to your points, that assumes that NYT even has a process to tweak, or that its development staff even understands a phased approach and is capable of using proactive project management -- assumptions that are not good to make in today's world of software development, exactly for the reasons you name.
As an aside, it is EXACTLY THIS REASON that *good* programmers and developers in the U.S. still have jobs despite the folks in India and other countries who are debatably "stealing" U.S. jobs. They might be able to throw code monkeys (which I use to refer to anyone who "just codes" -- this is not a racial/nationalism reference) at a project on the cheap, but it is much harder to find quality people who understand how to effectively MANAGE a software development process. There the U.S. still stands head and shoulders above any other nations that dare to think they have anything coming close to "competition".
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Coral Content Distribution Network
https://addons.mozilla.org/en-US/firefox/addon/2570
get the copy from from CoralCDN nyud.net:8080
before :
http://www.nytimes.com/2008/10/10/arts/10chea.html?_r=1&ref=music&oref=slogin
after:
ht tp://www10.nytimes.com.nyud.net:8080/2008/10/10/arts/10chea.html?_r=5&ref=music&oref=slogin
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Coral_Content_Distribution_Network
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