Bugmenot.com is a way of avoiding the irritating login procedures on many free sites, notably many news sites. It's kind of like the various programs for trading consumer surveillance cards to pollute their databases. Yes, you too can be a 99 year old lady who websurfs to dog and pony pr0n, performance car websites, and suspicious literary sites, all at the same time.

To use it, go to http://www.bugmenot.com, and put the website's address in the box. You will get another page with a username and password that you should be able to use to log into the site. It doesn't always work; in that case, you can click on the 'This login didn't work' button and get another.

And, if all else fails, you can take one for the team and sign in yourself, go through whatever verification procedure needs to be done, using throwaway email addresses from Hotmail or something similar; even better, a Sneakemail address. Verify the account so it can be used, then abandon the Hotmail as the stinking pile of crap it is, or delete the Sneakemail address...or keep it to see who you get spam from so you can add them to your spam filters. Fill out the form that appears when you click 'I want to add my own', and you've made the world a slightly less annoying place. Good on yer.

For Firefox users, there is an extension available from Bugmenot's site, although at the moment (10/6/2005) the site comes up looking like someone forgot to pay their domain bill.

If you can find it, the extension allows you to right click in a user name field, and it will automagically fill in the fields with an apparently randomly chosen set of data. If it doesn't work, try, try again.

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