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To be online, for most people, means to be part of some online communities, but the moment you visit a website, you are beginning your user lifecycle with that site. Previous quantitative work has shown that the early stages of the user lifecycle are the most important. We asked 400 users of the Cyclopath geowiki to complete a survey asking, among other things, about why they chose to register and what their first experiences on the site were. The responses allow us to think more carefully about the difficult barrier of registration and how this may be impacting the user lifecycles on Cyclopath and other online communities.