Hi Guys, What areas of your forum do you allow your guests to view? Do you let them view all forums that members see, or do you limit them? I've seen a few forums install a hack which only allows guests to view a certain amount of posts until they are told to register. I've also seen a mod which limits how much of the actual post they can read. Do you have any of these kind of restrictions in place? Or perhaps you have different restrictions.
I let guests view everything except an off topic forum and a private forum for members with 25 posts plus. As a matter of fact I just changed this yesterday our main forum used to be private but now that's public and I created the private forum for 25+ post members. If spiders weren't treated as guests, I would do that differently and have less publicly available. From my stats it looks as if a lot of people are clicking, finding a solution to their problem then leave. No registration/follow up posts. Frustrating.
I depends on the forum, I think. And I mean that both ways - it depends on the actual forum and the forums within the forum. Sometimes it should be private, sometimes it shouldn't. If you run some kind of support forum, I don't think you should be hiding anything. I know I don't like it when I try to view a thread and I get the message of unwelcome. I suppose it's only fair I join if I want to use what the forum has, but usually I don't. :p
Yeah. I mean, what you don't know about or can't see can't hurt you, but when you can SEE it but can't read or view it, I think that is what gets up my nose.
It really depends, like Savage said. Here, everything is viewable by guests with no limits or restrictions. But on my forum, the Announcements and all Miscellaneous forums are hidden. In addition, our Classifieds section and Breeder Directory is semi-restricted. Users can see the thread titles but must register to view the contents of the threads. It's actually worked out quite well since we're essentially the largest site in our niche.
I allow guests to view everything - no restrictions. As I've found that limiting them to specific forums generally does not help with gaining new members, keeping everything public has proven to be much more effective, particularly when it comes to promotion. I've ran across forums where nothing is visible to guests. Not very smart in my opinion.
I started off limited things but later changed to to open for everyone. It just seemed like this move attracted more visitors than before when some sections was closed.
It can be quite funny. Some of them even place "guest messages" on the board index that say things such as, "We have a variety of fantastic content on this website. If you'd like to see it, please register first". Hold up a second. In order to even get a preview of this "fantastic content", we have to register first? Yes, yes... that makes complete and total sense. :p
It depends. I have one forum with 400k+ posts that switched to no-guest-viewing half a year ago. We even have a system in place where new members must introduce themselves before having the membership activated. The reason is that we're converting to more of a "online club" than a forum. Plus, here in Germany, the laws are ridiculous as far as forums and blogs go. So by leaving Google and Guests out of the equation, we save ourselves bother and money. Like for example I got threatened with a law suit, because someone on my forum wrote: "company X ripped me off!" But for most of the forums I run or help run, guests can view pretty much everything.
Remember your search bots are like guest so if you limit out the guest your limiting out your search bots too... Like a popular forum (I know of) is a pay site and uses this limited viewing hack guest... Funny part is that site has poor returns in Google and such because the guest lmitation is keeping the search engines out too... Something to consider...
I was viewing another forum, and it was beginning to look rather interesting. Then a window popped up telling me I needed to register to continue viewing. I closed the window never to return. On our site I'm well aware there are members that only log in to post, even though a few features are disabled for guests e.g. view attachments. They would not come at all if they could not view the threads.
