Beta Blog: Kill Your Signup Form with Rails
http://blog.henriquez.net/2009/08/kill-your-signup-form-with-rails.html

Even though the gradual engagement meme has been around for a while, and everyone just hates signup forms, they just seem to keep popping up like a bad habit.

Ok.

Tips for eliminating the signup process - other ways to discourage spam bots, and track users without passwords.

Even though the gradual engagement meme has been around for a while, and everyone just hates signup forms, they just seem to keep popping up like a bad habit. My site, Newsforwhatyoudo.com was one of the guilty parties. We saw users coming back to the site repeatedly, but not signing up. The percentage that looked at the signup form and then bolted was uncomfortably high. It was time to kill the signup form. This blog post documents how we implemented gradual engagement using Ruby on Rails and restful authentication.