So, I passed by the local chop-shop again tonight (as I do every day), and this time I thought “I wonder if there’s some kind of on-line forum for reporting such things?”. A brief Googling led me to this site. And sure enough, there was a form into which people could input information about chop-shops and stolen bikes being sold. The form has two fields: the information one wants to post, and a field for one’s e-mail. So, being a Good Samaritan-type, I put in an exhaustive description of the chop-shop, and then input my e-mail address and hit “submit”.
What do I get for my trouble? Being forwarded to a page that says “you must be logged-in to do that” (or words to that effect). This means that (1) all of the information that I just tried to submit has disappeared, so (2) if I want to add it, I have to create an account, and then (3) I have to waste another 5 minutes of my life trying to remember what I had just typed, and type it again, once I have created that account.
Please get word to your back-end folks: it’s fucking irritating to have a UI imply that one can simply submit info, so long as one also supplies an e-mail address (for verification), but then NOT have it retain this info. Why even have a field for accepting info, if being logged-in is first required?! And for that matter, why would anyone who is laying out a UI, add a field for the user’s e-mail address at all?! That’s usually what log-in buttons at the top of a page are for. MAKES NO SENSE.