Forum

Thinking of Member only Viewing..
 

I notice a lot of people lurking on the forums, as guest. They suck up good information but don't contribute... and it's starting to irk me.

I'm thinking about closing the forums on guest and making them sign up as a new member to view the forums. Only members and search engines would be able to view the forums.

I may do some testing with this to make sure the search engines don't beat me up for doing it, but I'll probably implement this in a week or so.

What do you guys think?

Well, unless you code an add on to the forum to allow things like the googlebot to search your forum etc.. I don't see any pages being listed in the inde. Just my 2cents. Also, I don't see it making people contribute, you will just have a bunch of inactive users.

Well, the add-on is cookie based. Search Engine bots usually do not read cookies, so they shouldn't be affected, but that's where some testing comes in. But you could be right about inactive users... but then again if they're registered already it makes it easier to reply to threads, etc. We'll see...

If you lock it down I think there would be a run on new members joining just to read the information.
This might be a good time to implement a New Member Section.

Makes sense, thanks for the input HWGA.

Implemented.. and testing..

I think there will a lot more new members because anytime I wanted to read information and had to create an account on a forum or something, I always did. And if I liked the information I would always come back so...I think it is a good idea.

I think it's a bad idea. People would just join the forum. There's a zillion members and only about 100 or so have ever posted. Just lots of lurkers. Unless you want to make it hard to register with "moderator approval" like some annoying forums do, then it won't help.

Making stuff member-only would only hurt you with search engines. You have a popular site and should be able to make lots of money on advertising.

It's been in action for a few days now, and what I'm seeing is more people registering, and more people posting with no effects on search engines because the usage of denying a person is cookie based. Search engine bots don't use cookies so they don't have a problem indexing pages.

I think it's a positive movement so far. I have yet to see any negatives, I'm still waiting to see if there will be any.

And to add it limits viewing after the 15th thread is viewed, it has warnings to sign up as well before the limit takes place.

Is there any way to block the really new people from posting items for sale?
I have seen 3 Posts in the last 5 days from members with a post of 1-3 with what I would call ⊗⊗⊗⊗ items for sale.
There was a new one today.

Maybe make the "Marketplace > Buy, Sell or Trade" a members only area?
Leave the Marketplace > Buy And Sell eBay Accounts" a non-member area?

As always... Just my 2 cents

or maybe having the threads get approved first can help.

Just a small suggestion. I think it would be a good idea to allow members to view the subscribed threads after they have reached a certain post count. So at least this way you will know that members in the subscribed section are there through either the purchase of the ebook or there contribution to the forum.

^^^^ i definitely agree :)

Aye, yes I've been looking for a mod to do just this the other day. I think I'll make it where you have to have 20 or so post before you can post in the section. I'll get it setup soon.

Another good idea. What do you think the post limit should be?

15th thread viewed? So that's why I wasn't able to see it working. Well if you let them view a bunch of threads first, then it might be a good plan.

I also like your cookies method better than cloaking.

nytimes.com has been cloaking for about 10 years where if you don't have cookies enabled, it makes you log in, except for search engines that it lets crawl like crazy. I always hate it from people link to that site, which seems to happen more than any other news site for some reason. webmasterworld.com has been cloaking about 5 years where if you visit the first page, you view it, then it bans your IP address for a day, but it lets all the search engines crawl itself to death. Both those sites are always top google results and everyone knows they cloak, but google does nothing.



As for keeping noobs from posting noob threads, the software can just require them to wait for a certain period of time and view 100 posts before posting. If this is too hard to implement, mods can always close their threads with the phrase "lurk moar".

I think a post count of say 80+ should be sufficent.this will seperate a active user from a not so active ome