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We often get asked by people who are interested in Perch why we ask people to sign up for a demo. Perhaps they assume we are trying to collect email addresses for marketing purposes, which many sites do. However we have an explicit opt-in checkbox for that purpose. If you check that box we will very, very occasionally mail you – for example if there is a major update to Perch, or we have one of our special offers running. I think in the history of Perch we have sent emails to that list three times.

If you don’t check the box the only emails you will receive are:

• An email with details of your demo
• An email when your 24 hour demo expires

That’s it. We won’t bother you again. We need your email address to send your login details to you, and your name becomes the name on the demo account. In the same way that if you installed Perch you would set up an initial admin account.

So why ask for registration in the first place? Surely we could just have an open demo with a published login?

The problem with that is that we want people to get to play with Perch in as realistic a way as possible. If there were 20 or so people all playing with the same demo, it is likely they would edit the same bits of content and potentially make Perch look as if it is behaving inconsistently.

We would also need to do an hourly refresh or similar meaning that you might be in the middle of making changes and the system refreshes, loses your changes and throws you out.

We put a lot of thought into how to allow people to demo Perch in a realistic way and this solution does seem to work well for people. For those who don’t trust us with their details you can always use a fake name and throwaway account to sign up. We don’t mind.