Oh man, I just ran into this. I work on a product that has a 3rd party API so other people can write plug-ins to extend the functionality of the app. It's great

Oh man, I just ran into this. I work on a product that has a 3rd party API so other people can write plug-ins to extend the functionality of the app. It's great for users and developers. We received a bug report related to a particular plug-in, so I went to download their demo to see if the problem was on our end or theirs before contacting them. Here's how the process went: 1) Go to their website and click "Download" 2) Prompted to enter email address with no way to opt out. Shit. Go to mailinator.com and create a fake email address to enter. Enter it. 3) Wait for them to send the real download link to my fake email. 4) It came in almost instantly. Great! Click on the link. 5) Click to download the installer package. Wait a few minutes. 6) Run the installer package. 7) It needs the same email address and password so it knows I'm a "legitimate user" just to install the thing. 8) After entering it, it kicks me back to the web page for some reason. No idea what it's looking for or what I'm supposed to do on the web site, so I go back to the installer. Oh it's not an installer. It's an installer installer. It's going to download the installer I want from a list of dozens of possible installers. Download the real installer. 9) Run the real installer - It lists dozens of products. Find the one I want. Install it. 10) Prompted for email and password again. And keep in mind this is all before I'm actually a customer. I haven't paid anything and am trying to evaluate the software to determine if it fits my needs. (Or I would be if I were an end user.) Honestly, if this weren't for my job, I would have given up on step 2. Fuck these people. I'm trying to save them time by seeing whether the bug is ours or theirs, but they're actively wasting mine and everyone else's who downloads this crap.