To Meany Guests

VIVV

Solid State Member
Messages
15
Location
England
Theres always about 1-6 members onlien and 100+ guests, its relivly annoying because if there is a queery then there is potentionaly so meany people who could answer it but cant be bothered to make an account post, therefore there isnt much activity during the day on the forums which is disapointing as there could be loads, is there any way so that either guests can post or that they cant veiw threads unless making accounts? I know that theres a risk of loosing veiws as people might just go and find a new forums because they dont want to make an account, But it could possibly bring more activity to the forums and bring the community mroe together. just a suggestion.
 
The reason why there is so many guests there because its all the search bots that randomly search and may register.
 
@OP
This shows your inexperience as a web master. In the first place you don't let anonymous guests post anything, period. In most cases they're just window shopping for answers or like BK said it's search bots or bad bots.
As for the other comment you make about restricting viewing, this subject has been beat in to the ground at both Vbulletin support sites. Unless you have adult content or something that is so controversial, you want access to your site open to the public. Your content gets looked over by the search bots and people use that to jump to your forum looking for an answer. A closed forum or restricted viewing can be detrimental to page rankings as well as getting ignored by POTENIAL MEMBERS.

Think about this rule of webmasters > Content is king.
With out being able to see your content you're nothing more than the court jester...
 
is there any way so that either guests can post or that they cant view threads unless making accounts? I know that theres a risk of loosing views as people might just go and find a new forums because they dont want to make an account, But it could possibly bring more activity to the forums and bring the community more together. just a suggestion.

Some forums do allow guest posts without having to register an account but a lot forums will not allow that as they want more users.
 
Spam control is the big problem. On some forums the owners don't give a damn about the forum. They allow the porn posts by bots and the endless spam. If you look close at these forums, they have died or been long abandoned. Very few that are still active allow open posting.
You have to keep control of your forum if you don't want to be standing in front of a judge explaining how you let that sort of garbage go on and let kids see that.
Contrary to a belief by some, the owner and admins can be dragged in to court and held responsible for the content of their forums. Open posting can be dangerous.
 
its all the search bots that randomly search and may register.

How can search bots register?

Either way, seti is dead on. It's all spam control. I remember how things were when I first joined. This was not a site you could go to while bored at school or work because of all the porn spam. The mods were on top of it as best as they could but there is only so much that the one mod who happened to check in at the time could do (we didn't have some of the tools that we do now to make life quick and simple) The "team Thelegorm" line in my sig is a carry over of those days - for those who remember Thelis he and I would work together so one would ban the user the other would quickly clean everything up. Those 21 spammers were all within a month, and after we decided to keep count.

I'd much rather see all of those people stay as guests who don't make work for me and the rest of the mods then to allow them to post.
 
Those 21 spammers were all within a month, and after we decided to keep count.
When was this? Time has really changed!

I built a MyBB board a few months ago just to see how many spammers it would attract. I gave it one link from my main site. After three months, I was getting 1K+ spammer registrations per week; most don't even bother with spam posts any more. Instead they use birthday + link spam with their profiles.

Most of the spam I got were trying to sell drugs. I don't remember seeing any porn.

I also run anonymous imageboards (think 2ch). No registration is required. But they don't get nearly as many spam posts as any of the popular forum software.
 
a lot of the porn spam (IIRC) was old members who had been banned coming back with a grudge.
 
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