Dear Comics.com

I realized a while back that my daily dose of  “Get Fuzzy” wasn’t arriving in my RSS feed every day any more.  Figuring that some dope had meddled a bit and broken the thing, I went to your site today to re-subscribe to the feed.

Now, before I go on, nice job on the new site.  It’s still a little cluttered (understandable – you’re running a comics site), but the colors are lighter and the design is a lot cleaner and less intrusive.  So, well done to you.

Now here’s the rub: when you click on “RSS,” here’s the message that appears:

Login or register now to personalize your RSS feed with all your favorite strips and editorial cartoons!

Um… no.  Someone has a shaky grasp of the acronym.  Let me explain: “RSS” stands for “Really Simple Syndication.”  As in, “click to sign up, and have Bucky, Satchel, and Rob arrive automatically in your Google reader until you say nay.”

What you have here is, “click to create an ID and password, type the password twice to make sure your valuable comics-reading data is secure, enter a bunch of personal information, type a captcha,* log in, click to ‘add to my comics page,’ click….”

Are you starting to get the idea?  This is starting to look not so “really simple” anymore.  If you want to collect information about your readers, fine.  But you might consider that you’re getting fewer of them as a result.

*I’m assuming based on standard protocols, I didn’t actually sign up.