No guest viewing permissions?
-
Thread started by Nebulous
- Credits
- 185,436
Depends on how many are turned off, I've been to some, where they had all their boards hidden, lol did not join.
I don’t care to join forums where I can’t see the content. Some boards hidden is one thing; I have that on my own forum for privacy issues. I only join if I already know the person & that it’s active. Too many times I’ve joined a forum like this & come to find out, it hasn’t been active in years! Or worse, spam is overrun.
They definitely have something to hide initially by making it so that you can't see any content unless you have registered.
- Credits
- 185,436
This, I keep a few boards hidden like the ask questions board, random people don't need to see anything.
- Credits
- 65,286
If a no Guest viewing forum is recommended by a friend, family member, co-worker, teacher, or a trustworthy expert/website on a topic like computer repair, I will join the forum to see if the forum is worth my time.
That's not a bad way to go about it. Once there's other boards to view majority of the contents.
- Credits
- 2,675
That is a choice, but I believe they are doing more harm to traffic than they thought.
Yeah, it's definitely their choice and it's also choice to stay out of it.
- Credits
- 969
I don't want to waste my time so if I need help with something I look it up myself elsewhere. Most of the time I can't bother with joining unless it's an interesting topic.
- Credits
- 1,373
Well, I guess it depends on how curious I am about the forum's content. It's like a mystery box - you never know what's inside until you open it. But on the other hand, if I have to jump through too many hoops just to see what's going on, I might lose interest and go find some cat videos to watch instead.
It's definitely not worth the stress if they make it to be very tedious to have access to the forum contents.
- Credits
- 2,675
Possibly it is a form of ensuring that the people visiting the site see the need to join quickly.
Or it might end up making them to walk away too quickly.
- Credits
- 2,675
If you want to see what's in a site, there is no big with registering on the said site. Is there any issues with that?
- Credits
- 16,592
It hurts a guest's first impression and it also hurts your ability for organic SEO. Overall I find that it is a bad idea as getting registered members and free traffic are generally the top two goals an admin would want to achieve. Granted, hiding some sections can make sense, but overall I don't believe it does much good.
- Credits
- 2,675
Oh well, maybe hiding some section of the forum is not bad. The visitor gets to see some part, but not the rest of the forums.
- Credits
- 65,286
I wonder if there are poorer forum owners who may not allow guest viewing to avoid going over the CPU, RAM, and bandwidth limit on free and very cheap shared web hosting plans which may sometime disable your website if it is using too much bandwidth, or server resources like using too much CPU and RAM resources.