It's a sad day to see an internet icon go down, but congrats to you and the pinboard team. I finally made the leap.

I bet. I looked at signing up, but the password field is plain text. What's up w/ that?

It's pale plain text at password creation time, and regular password dots when you login. Saves having to have a 'confirm password' box.

I've been a huge fan of you for years, I've read almost everything you've written online a couple times over, and I'm asking you to please stop listening to Jakob Nielsen. Please.

The most fundamental kernel of usability is "does what I expect", and everybody expects password masking everywhere. Everybody expects to type their password twice to register and once to login (the only fundamental distinction!). Everybody is extraordinarily habituated to typing their passwords blind, it's of absolutely no use to display them.

Really, the minimum result you get is that people take longer to sign up because they pause to be infuriated at your design decision.

Don't try to redefine a fundamental UI component that has a universally consistent implementation and is totally orthogonal to the innovative bits of your app. Seriously, stop being an asshole and always use <input type=password> for user-chosen secrets.

Try http://historio.us/, we have a password confirmation field!

Aaand that is one sentence I thought I'd never get to utter. Seriously though, pinboard is great too, and closer to the functionality of delicious. It's mostly a matter of preference.

And instead makes me feel uncomfortable storing my data with you. Doesn't seem like a worthwhile tradeoff

It surprised me, but then I went "huh, that makes sense" and continued on.

Guess I'm the odd one out.

It still caused you to pause and slowed down your experience though.

Have you tested whether it leads to more or less sign ups?

Sorry, after seeing this I didn't sign up. Might seem petty and I realize that the plain text field is sent the same as a password field, but at least maybe change the sign up page to use your secure site by default. Doesn't look like you had a bad day of business though.

This also prevents the pwdhash plugin I have installed from working. I agree with the other commenters - this is a bad design decision. Don't make things inconsistent and arbitrary, please.

Yup, "The service is not available. Please try again later."

We've been trying to figure that one out. No connection problems for the vast majority of people, but there are a couple who report this

It happened to me the first time I tried to look at pinboard today. I'm on a satellite modem out in the middle of nowhere -- maybe a latency bug? Problem was gone when I tried a little later.

I can confirm that I ran into this too. Went back to the homepage and tried again, worked.