I shouldn't have to ?*(<|#% register to do that!

The house we bought out here is not only bigger than any we've had before but it is bigger than we actually needed. There just wasn't anything smaller that met our needs on the market when we had to buy, so we had to take what was available.

The shear size of the place has been a problem from a WiFi perspective.¹ There has been signal and bandwidth everywhere, but in some corners both sometimes drop pretty low. One of those corners is the guest bedroom which is where I work-from-home.

Well, complaints from my better half finally got me off my duff. I bought a couple of meshing extenders. Nice ones that maintain the same SSID none-the-less. The instructions included in the box tell me to download the app and use it to configure the widgets. I grumbled a bit, but fine. Except that once I have the app I learn that it requires me to set up an account with the manufacturer's web site.

Are you kidding me? Why would I want to do that?

It's a serious question. What makes them think I want to register?

In a word: No!

Now, it turns out these widgets support a WPS pairing mechanism.²

However, that wasn't mentioned in the material in the box and was pushed to the very bottom of the help web page: a tiny paragraph of plain text under screen-fulls of colorful pictures and enumerated lists of steps supporting the two ways to register with them to get it done.

I can only assume that this is done in bad faith. It is a malicious act in the service of the company to the detriment (admittedly small) of their customers and it makes the world a tiny bit worse.

Worse, I think the printed docs included the no-registration instructions at some time (the controls for it are labeled on the diagram but never referred to). At some point a marketing jerk told the tech writers to make the documentation worse and the tech writers complied, but they didn't take the time to scrub all the traces of their lost efforts.

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¹ The house actually has some kind of wire-in-the-wall-and-RJ45-jacks system from Honeywell pre-installed, but we didn't get the printed docs from the previous owner and I have never figured it out. Naively it looks like some kind of star topology that assumes you're putting the control next the main panel (i.e in the laundry room). So we're living with wireless. Besides there are relatively few ports and most of them are in inconvenient places.

² Just as well for them. I'd have sent them back rather than register. And so should you. Fight this nonsense.