POLL: New posts for Guest viewing (1.Viewing)

Just curious, why are we eliminating viewing the new posts while not logged in and as guests?

I prefer to view the posts and when I’m going to post I log in. I think this is counterproductive and if we are going to do that I would rather the forum just be private.

You can never really see new posts as a guest, what worked was active topics but that is different from new posts. New posts cannot work as a guest because it needs to set a cookie for that. I have reactivated the "Active Post" link which is tied to search. So when I enable search for guests the Active Posts link will display because it is basically a search.

If you log out you will never see the Red "New Posts" link because that is tied to your user name.
I explain that here: https://dn.ca/topic/366/view-indicator-in-red/


At one point there were almost 200 guests using search and viewing the board and most of them were not registering as users because all the features are available to guests. So even though I turned the search and active links back on that may change if too many resources get used by guests. When I look at the stats I am seeing a lot of people from other boards visiting and using search and never registering. By removing search for guests it removes that active posts link and it is a toss up if we should leave it on or turned off. In the end we are encouraging participation and by giving all the features to guests we are not encouraging sign up.

So I activated it again until we discuss it further, maybe I can get some input for yes or no from members. I can go either way but my instinct tells me it should be shut off for guests to encourage sign ups.

OK I guess it was the active posts that I was seeing. Nonetheless, I think you will will soon figure out that there will always be more guests than registered users. That’s the way it is. There are a lot of bots which will always be crawling all the pages and then there are those that will never join/participate.

If we had a private forum, again maybe this was never your intention but you may then start to see more registered users and even then they may still not participate.

Food for thought. I think the .CA market is perfect for a private forum. If I were to go back in time that’s what I would have done.

I was not thinking of making it a private forum, I was just looking at taking away search until a guest registers.
The Active Topic link was just a casualty of that decision and I have restored it for now until I get some member feedback.

I think I will add a poll



Edit: OK I added a poll, lets see what members think

Vote please

I see you have guest posting disabled, I think search and active posts should be disabled too, I would take it a step further and restrict the buy&sell forum to guests.

RedRider said:

I see you have guest posting disabled, I think search and active posts should be disabled too, I would take it a step further and restrict the buy&sell forum to guests.

Click to expand...

I guess this was my thinking. If we are going to disable features where guests cannot use. Where does it stop? In that case, it’s becoming more private than public. Surely, if the majority of the forum can’t be accessed unless you’re a registered member it defeats the purpose of the traffic from google.

Everything is accessible to guests, except you have to register to post and the private forums are restricted.

They cannot have a new post link because it needs to set a cookie so the active topic link will have to do.

I was not comfortable with search being accessible to guests that is why the active link disappeared. It has since been restored so all is good to go. I think right now giving guests a preview will entice them to join.