A lot of sites requre registration simply to collect user information that is valuable for purposes of sale to mailing lists, related businesses, advertisers. Thats not me. You get a login to dslreports.com only to make it easier for you to use, and to personalize the site to your taste. Clearly I want you to come back and use the site a lot, and to recommend it to your friends who are thinking of DSL, and to help others here, and I wish to let you know (just every now and again), whats been added to the site (optional of course). All this is much easier if I know you are you.

tell me more?

The features of my site is many sections are customized according to your location. So you get just the information you need to make decisions about DSL service. You can also instantly use any of the more interesting sections of the site where I need to tell the difference between different users, for example the bulletin boards, the security scan, posting to usenet discussions, and tracking the replies to your messages, using the DSL marketplace etc.

If you are registered, you can leave comments on the site, use the forum, use the security scanner, and post or respond to reviews of ISPs.. I need to tie these things back to a working email address, otherwise (for the comments) you appear as "Anonymous Coward", and for the security scanner obviously I cannot open that in case of mis-use.
I have tried to make as many site features work for anonymous users, but if you plan to spend some time using this site, it really is easier if you get a site account.

What about SPAM? Will i get junk mail?

NO JUNK EMAIL. I take a lot of effort to ensure that the email address you give us does not appear in any machine readable form on my web pages, so that it wont get scooped up by spam farmers... In your user profile, there is an even higher privacy setting available. This means whatever you contribute to the site, whether it be reviews or comments, is not labelled with your email at all! It is therefore not possible for anyone to pick off your email address even manually.. so for example, your DSL provider, if they cared, cannot identify the email address behind a critical review..
In addition, again, I am not in the business of capitalizing from the site user list.. your email is not given to ISPs, to advertisers, or to anyone, I can guarantee you will get zero pieces of junk email as a result of subscribing! I do like to keep my site users informed about new features, so you can receive occasional emails from me (no more than one a month!) that say, hey, come back and check out this cool new feature.. You can of course choose to not even receive these emails, but they are just done as a little site self-promotion.

not another password!

It is boring, having so many different account names, passwords and so on for all these useful internet sites, but unfortunately, that is the way the internet operates now. To make things easier, I try to make the registration as fast and as easy as possible. My "forgot password" feature means you will never have to give up on logging in. Also our "persistent login" means if you always use the same browser on the same computer, your initial login lasts as long as you want it to, even forever if you wish..

In future, there will undoubtably be a commonly used form of persistent personal identification that avoids all these duplicated accounts and multitude of passwords, and when that occurs, we will support it, until then, I apologize for adding yet another account name and password to your collection.

So, that is the straight talk on why user registration is necessary and useful. Of course, you can tour dslreports.com without registration, but to make contributions to my review database, or to use more advanced functions, user registration and login is necessary.