Hi, Just wanted to do a poll to find out from other web masters using E-Blah if they think that disallowing Guest access to the board would increase registrations?
Or just make people leave without bothering.

I'm sure the search bots can still access the board. Is this right?

Vote on the poll or leave a response to what you think Disallowing Guest access would do.

Also depending on the results of this, I'm planning to disable guest access, Just showing the registration/login page to guests on my forum for 24 hours in a week or so to see if this increases the daily registration average for that day...

Would anyone else be willing to participate in this test? I.e. disabling it on your forums so we can all compare results?

Thanks.

I think it really depends on the forum.... and point of it. My forum is about rats, and so, it's helpful to allow Guest access to most sections. But I would never give guests access to post if that is also what you mean?

Not to post, I agree..

I meant not allowing guest access at all.. So when users enter your domain, they see the login page requesting them to either sign in or sign up.

I think if they find the forum via search engines they have already read the title and description from google and are interested in seeing the results. So forcing them to create an account before they can see anything should, In theory, make the registrations go through the roof...

For instance. If youtube had a welcome page with one big ad under it with "click here to proceed to youtube" underneath it they'd make millions more i'm sure... Or if you had to create an account to access any part of youtube. Their sign ups would go through the roof also..

I agree it depends on the forum though.

I'm talking about my Computer Technical Support Forum. What do you think about that kind of forum?

I, personally, would allowed Guest reading access.
But it depends on how you are about running forums I think - some people want more hits. My forum is big enough (about 6000 posts or so) but it isn't huge - every day he will get guests reading through topics on the help threads etc and bots which I think is all right.... I think it is ok to give people a choice as many people would prefer to read rather than join and try keep up with the forum.

It would decrease almost 100%.  The main reason?  Search engines.  If your pages are blocked, you are blocking content.  Content blockage means less people viewing your forum and being able to find things.

It's a bad idea to do that unless the forum is for a club or an administrator group or something to that effect.

Thanks for the advice..  

Total agreement on letting guests read. But as far as posting...Nope !!! Had big problemo when I used BB2 from undesirables . but now..all gone...you do have to keep security tight. not all "bots" are friendly!

Yeah, my curiosity has been cured now.. Thanks guys...

As for the unfriendly bots. I've not had one since using an akismet API key!  

Just another point, I had most boards blind but I found that people would join and then never post because it was not what they expected or something similar, at least when they can see what it's about they are more likely to post, and that is after all what I want.

Quoted from Enuff Rope

Just another point, I had most boards blind but I found that people would join and then never post because it was not what they expected or something similar, at least when they can see what it's about they are more likely to post, and that is after all what I want.

+1

Also, Akismet catches a LOT, but keep in mind that there's still a chance of getting spam when the Akismet service goes down.

Good point Enuff Rope, I'd rather have few members who post than lots who never post a thing... True...  

My site does not allow guest access, never has & never will. Members can't even see the main boards until they've gone through the email & administrator validation. I did create a board for unvalidated members but they can not post, it just has threads for the rules & an email address that they can email me if they do not receive the validation link. We're just a word of mouth site for moms in the area. We wanted privacy so we could openly discuss our families and kids without worrying about creepy perverts contacting us (which happened on a previous board we used).

We started in June 2008 and our stats are: 256 members, 3026 topics, 43832 messages.

In under 4 months you've got 44 thousand messages? whoa...  

We like to talk.

I tried guest posting without Akismet, then with Akismet enabled quite a bit of spam still got through, but I think the best way is to allow some guest reading on some boards to entice them in but having them becoming full members to post and to read other boards. In other words keep the interesting stuff out of sight until they join.