I've had occasion to register some usernames lately, you can guess why, and it's obvious that the developers are clueless as to what has happened. Wikipedia has so many users that, think of a name, it's taken, unless you make the name insanely complicated, usually. I found that I'd modify a name several times, still taken. Until I got really ridiculous with a complicated name.

(You can tell that I'm a relatively early Wikipedian by my username Abd.)

I'm sure that some of the new users have ended up registering PieceOfShit2393 out of pure frustration. They were talking about the software. And then, of course, they are blocked for a user name violation.

And then there is a captcha for each attempt. Yes, you fill in the name, the password twice, and then the captcha, it bounces you because the name is already in use, and you get another captcha. And you have to fill out stuff again and a new captcha.

And some of the captchas are impossible to read, at least for me. Maybe that's a Bad Sign.

Sensible sites accept the captcha correctly identified once and don't present another, as long as you remain connected, I imagine there is a time-out.

I'm sure the poor registration process was designed to make it hard for me to register socks. Oops! Did I say sock? I mean, rocks. Right, rocks. I'd like to register a rock, please. Room 407? Sure.

I am sure this is as frustrating for legitimate new users as it is for someone like you trying to create sockpuppets. It might help if they released all of the usernames that have no edits and no blocks, but I recall that there is some vague opposition to this idea. One would think if WP is interested in attracting new editors, any improvement to the sign-up process would be a no-brainer.

I don't typically have much trouble finding names for my socks.

Did this really come as a surprise? Try signing up somewhere like yahoo, hotmail, gmail, etc...today, there's so much already taken, the numbers or odd characters you have to add is like that, too. That's why I'm glad I stumbled onto hotmail way before MS snapped them up, so I have a nice 4-letter name.