The other day I was in town, and popped in to a shop to look at an interesting item. I was rather annoyed to be greeted by a shop assistant waving a large banner which obscured everything. He said he’d put the banner down if I handed over my contact details so he could send me marketing guff in the future. He only got out of the way when I kneed him in the Edwards.
Not strictly true of course. However – you wouldn’t run a physical shop this way, so why run web scripts that have the same effect?
I don’t want to register for your website – I just want to dip in for a quick look then leave (that still counts as a page view for you to quote to advertisers) and I’d suggest that’s pretty standard practice for the large majority of internet users.
I confidently state that no one, ever, in recorded history, has thought, when they got a pop-up inviting them to register their details, “Oo, how helpful that was. Thank you for obstructing my journey to what I really wanted”.
And I know I could probably configure a pop-up blocker to bypass them, but I don’t (often) walk around town accompanied by a bouncer. So just stop it, everyone who does this.
informationrightsandwrongs 
Amen to that, especially when I have reached a site from a promoted tweet in the first place (@wildfireapp I’m looking at you). I would add NO THANK YOU I DON’T WANT TO COMPLETE A SURVEY about how helpful your site has been, when I have hardly started using it yet. About once a year I have a session looking at a number of local council sites to research how they have sorted out their No-Overall-Control arrangements, and they nearly all produce the same SOCITM pop-up to this effect. After about the sixth it gets intensely annoying. And they are usually crap at telling me who is really running the council, anyway, but I haven’t got time to tell them that.
Someone raised a complaint at my employer (council) about the web bug served up by the SOCITM survey. I haven’t heard the outcome yet, but am interested to follow up.
NO THANKS REGISTERING IS A HAZZLE….STOP THE COHERSIVE TORMENT I WANT MY FCKNG FREEDOM