What should a signup form ask?

[Marek]

The threads about sign up/register buttons and about home page conversion had some interesting discussion in general, but here's a new question: What type of signup forms work best?

I've seen many various forms, and I think that often, they ask too much. There are those that are not so bad, and as for perhaps only username, password, and email, but then there are the long ones that ask everything from your birthdate to the number of whiskers on your grandmother's cat.  Let's look at some particular examples.

Email. Are you using players' emails to send them information or notifications? (I hope not spam!). If you're not, then what do you need their email for? It won't stop bots -- a captcha is simpler and more effective -- and it won't stop people from making multiple accounts. Services like mailinator.com make it trivial to make disposable emails. Forcing users to "confirm" the email code is just making them jump through hoops for no benefit to neither you nor them. If you actually DO use email to communicate with your players, make it optional.

Birthdate. Unless you're complying with some age-related laws, I don't think this is relevant. Especially when entering a date on a web form is often tedious, when drop down menus are involved.

Full name. In the Internet of today, people only divulge their real names when they choose to, and in the context of playing a simple computer game, most people would probably choose not to.

The fact is that users spend most of their internet time struggling with registration forms already -- that's why services like bugmenot exist. Users get frustrated at web sites that demand things up front. They might show up to your website with eagerness and curiosity, but then give up when they see that it requires *work* before they can find out more.

What are your thoughts? Am I being too harsh and minimalistic? What do you think is the perfect sign-up form?

[Chris]

The less the better.

It all comes down to your moderating capacity. If you have strong anticheat team/software you can skip all these, if you are alone and with poor tools you want to save your time by filtering users early.

[Xavier]

I can think of only one feature that will require email address in my game and it's "forgotten password". Other than that I don't see any benefits and this is why I only require username and password while registering. Well, at least in my pre-alpha, offline, local version.

Any suggestions of making "forgotten password request" available without the need for email address?

[dbest]

I started off my game with username/password and later added email for user validation. I intend to also collect a first name & last name for manager character that the player will take over.

[Chris]

Any suggestions of making "forgotten password request" available without the need for email address?

Pigeons?

[jannesiera]

Any suggestions of making "forgotten password request" available without the need for email address?

Pigeons?

Haha, xD. Best joke of today!

The less the better.

Agreed, this topic has come up a few times before, btw, and almost everybody agrees on this.

I only ask username, password and e-mail for communication and to have some sort of indication who this person is. Making email optional is a good and simple idea and I don't know why I have never thought of that .

[JGadrow]

Just because a feature might be useful does not mean it needs to be on your user registration form. In the very real case of "forgotten password" you can register a user with username and password. In their user config settings, they can choose to supply you with additional information. If they include an e-mail, they will be able to retrieve their password via e-mail.

Codestryke had a very neat idea in that one of his games that I played (probably all of them, though): offering an in-game reward for verifying an e-mail account. This will mean that most players will provide an e-mail and allow you to automatically handle their forgotten passwords. The users who decide to opt out and don't want the in-game reward for registering their email probably don't want to be bothered at all and likely know full-well that they'll be unable to access their account if they forget the password.

Now, that was a very long-winded way of saying that you can, feasibly, make e-mail optional in all cases. The only other registration form item that I would recommend would be a "Terms of Use" agreement. By having this on the registration form (or however users start playing) you're able to indemnify yourself from potentially business-threatening legal action because you can state that all users have to accept the agreement in order to be granted authorized access.

[Harkins]

Absolutely as little as possible. I saw registrations go up on NearbyGamers when I removed the password confirmation field. I'd like to remove the requirement for email address but haven't yet done the extra coding it'll take to store messages and nag people to give it to me eventually (so they can be notified when people contact them and recover lost passwords).

[codestryke]

If you really want to get the player in the door and hook them as soon as possible then don't ask for anything from them, instead provide a demo account

[JGadrow]

I agree... however even then you may need to do something to assert that the user knowingly accepted the site's terms of use. It might be as simple as putting in text next to where ever you have your "play now" link that states: "by clicking this link, you're affirming that you agree to the terms of use."

[travo]

Username, password, email, simple math question, checkbox... Anything else can be added after registration.

If you really want to get the player in the door and hook them as soon as possible then don't ask for anything from them, instead provide a demo account

I dont like the demo account idea.... but I have a few ideas I hope will work.

Rather than demo account, a demo world, basically a slightly modified proper game... Eg after 12 hours (or 1st cron afterwards) all accounts are killed, and their bases are returned to the empty bases list... Hopefully turns out as well as it sounds in my head lol

My other idea is a "world" which seems like it is filled with players, but really it is just made of the player and a few npc bases. The game for that player is in the database, so upon registration/inactive can be easily deleted

[133794m3r]

The idea of a demo account that lets people play it for up to twelve hours and actually experience the game like you said is a GREAT IDEA for games that are strategy games in general.

My idea was something like a demo account but let the players start up a very basic quest, they'd do a few of the in game things on the demo account. Then they could choose to start playing the game. And the EXTREMELY small amount of items they'd gotten by doing that miniquest would just be given to them. The key here is that a player who signs up w/o a demo account still gets the same exact items. So thus either way neither person's really at an advantage. Also of course this little world WOULD BE seperated from the rest of the game world. Those players would only be able to chat maybe if that'd be allowed chat with others who have a demo account.

My logic behind doing it like that would be so that those who were curious about the game and thought they may like to play it, could try it out w/o any information required. Then if they liked it they could sign up. But also it'd not make it so that they felt their entire "trial" was pointless.

Also of course trial accounts would be deleted after they had existed for 24hrs.

[die4me]

you know i added a user name availablity checker to sign up also a pop up that lets them know if the emails don't match so they don't gotta add all the information over again.
Also to stop bots do a spell check.
Are you human in other words
Example: What is the last letter in the word bird? answers being D,d set a default to something like A

[Chris]

Also to stop bots do a spell check.
Are you human in other words
Example: What is the last letter in the word bird? answers being D,d set a default to something like A

In games there are no spam bots, these only visit forums. This protection would not stop a custom made bot (since the question is static), only a generic one. And generic bots can not spam on your game anyway because these don't know how to use your game ingame chat/message system (well, maybe except MCCODES based games).