The Maple Application Center is thought to be useful enough to people that they won't mind a bit of pain to get to it.  The pain is there because 'becoming a member' is a (small) barrier to entry that qualifies you as actually 'interested in Maple'.  That is extremely valuable marketing information for Maplesoft.  They use the list of members to populate various mailing lists for their marketing material.

If the barrier is higher than the reward of access, then it becomes self-defeating, and the usefulness of the Maple Application Center nose-dives. 

The membership-based idea was quite popular on the Internet a few years ago [and still is in some niches].  But in other circumstances, even such a low barrier has been found to be ``too high'' and removed.  It is probably time for Maplesoft to revisit that idea - is their need of email addresses for spam campaigns more important than having more Maple users find the information they need to properly use Maple to its fullest?

I wanted to take a few moments to outline our marketing email communication policy. Only those users who have opted-in to one of our mailing lists will receive an email from us. We do not send email to anyone who has not opted in. At the bottom of each of our emails there is a link that allows you to unsubscribe, and a link to our privacy policy as well. One person mentioned that although they have unsubscribed, they still receive marketing communications from Maplesoft. If this is the case, this is an error that we would like to investigate. Maplesoft does not send any marketing communications to any email on our unsubscribe list. We take this policy extremely seriously.

In response to some of the concerns about Membership, anyone can become a Maplesoft Member and access our premium content without being added to one of our mailing lists. All mailing lists are entirely voluntary. Alternatively, it is possible to join our mailing lists, without becoming a member. In addition to accessing the application center content, members also have access to our library of recorded webinars, all whitepapers listed throughout the site, our podcasts, and many other special incentives that we offer to our member community. We offer a Student Help Center and a Teacher Resource Center in addition to the Application Center, which would explain why we’ve not called our membership a “Maplesoft Application Center Member.” Also, we leave a significant amount of our website content available to anyone, even if they are not members. For example, if someone is interested in Maple they can review product specific information such as our demonstration movies without needing to become a member. We also make all of our support documents available to anyone, including non members, such as our product user manuals.

Lastly, if anyone would like to add “Maplesoft Member” to their signature, please feel free to do so – in fact, we would be pleased if you did!

If you have any other questions or concerns, please feel free to email customerservice@maplesoft.com.