Bypass registration at various websites with BugMeNot

Many news, review, download websites require mandatory login, even though you seldom visit them afterwards. Instead of registering for every site, use BugMeNot tool to avoid registration and browse the site.

Many sites are using OpenID concept, where users can register once and use the same ID across various sites such as Blogger.com, Wordpress.com and other sites.

But not every site uses this OpenID concept; they instead force us to register at their site. The problems in sharing data we face is first security, our information may not be safe at these sites. The sites may just harvest the details and sell it to others or the site may be vulnerable and our information might get stolen. Also, we seldom visit that site often and we may feel a registration is unnecessary. It is a headache even to keep track of all the user names and passwords.

Without a registration, however, we cannot comment or read the articles. So, to avoid registration in those sites which you don’t feel comfortable and also to browse the site, just use BugMeNot, a simple bypass tool.

Click BugMeNot.com or http://bugmenot.com and enter the site that requires a registration in the welcome screen shown as above. It will give you a set of user ID and password to access that particular site. For example, I typed Forbes.com and found out the following username and password.

I have a membership at Forbes.com, but I checked the above username and password combination, it works.

BugMeNot provides this information so we can access these sites without any problem in a “Public” mode and without registering for the site. They have a Firefox extension here or you can bookmark the above link.

If you have too many Firefox extensions and don't want to have another one, then you can use this bookmarklet and drag it to your bookmarks (I keep it in the Bookmark Toolbar in Firefox for easy access). So, when you visit a site that requires a login, just click the bookmarklet, it opens a new window with the username and password for that site.

I also tried it for Digg.com, it gave the following message.

Site Blocked

This site has been barred from the bugmenot system for the following reason:

community site - guests can still view everything

Which is very good, we don’t need a login for browsing a community site that is open for public view. But if you want to comment and rate, then you should have a login. As far as other sites, we can use BugMeNot tool to avoid registration.