What the ... registration?!?!?

I decided to see how hard it would be to register for the Korea Times in English. If it worked I was going to leave a link to the original 2008 Daily Mail article they pilfered. Considering it IS an English language newspaper it should be user friendly when it comes to foreigners registering in English. Of course, I also know I am talking about the Korea Times, let alone a Korean website, so I expected it to be a pain in the ass.

When you hit the register button you are given two options. One in Korean and one in English labelled "Foreigner Register". Not "Registration for Foreigners". Not "Foreigners Register Here." Not even "Foreigner Registration". Just the poorly worded "Foreigner Register".

After trying five times the registration page for foreigners STILL wouldn't load. I tried loading other pages, even other KT pages and had no problem.

The Korean language registration page loaded with no problem the 1st try.

But going back immediately for a 6th try at loading the "Foreigner Register" still ended in failure. Everytime it failed on a time out error.

Error 118 (net::ERR_CONNECTION_TIMED_OUT): The operation timed out.

What the kimchi?

The Korean language registration page is useless not just because it is in Korea but because it requires a Korean ID number. Unless you are a foreigner working and living in Korea with an Alien Registration Card you can't use this. Mind you that is ONLY if they accept the ARC number, not many Korean sites actually accept the number even though the Korean government will tell you they do.

I switched to Internet Explorer, I had been using Google Chrome, and tried again. Again it was a big FAIL. According to Microsoft troubleshooting

Problem found: resource (www.koreatimes.co.kr) is online but ins't responding to destected connection attempts.

I tried a couple more times and still had no joy. So 10 attempts to register all failed because the "Foreigner Register" page won't load while at the same time the Korean language one loads easily. Seems like the Korea Times doesn't REALLy want foreigners to register and comment on their craptastic site.

Am I surprised? Of course not. A site/rag that seems to like to villify foreigners, fake stories, fake statistics, plagarise, and ignore reality doesn't really seem like one that would want to hear what foreigners have to say.