suggestion for Board visibility control

[dDOTr2]

Hi all,

             Now its been 9 days since i opened my discussion board. me and my 2 friends hav started to make the site a content rich and we are working on SOE too..

My problem is, i hav made most of my boards visible and accessible to public , i.e no need for registeration. i hav already adviertised my site on many other discussion boards. People are viewing the posts on my board within a few hours of creation but none makes a registeration. some posts hit 18 views within 3 hrs of creation. so here the quick questions

1) do i need to keep the boards visible and most importantly accessible to public (currently i closed the access to guest)

2) does the view count for a post increases whenever a spider crawls my site.

thank you,

P.s please do visit my site by spending a little of our valuable time and make me any kinda suggestions to improve. plz

thanks again.

[dDOTr2]

No idea? someone plz help and sorry for the BUMP

[Bigguy]

1.) You don't have to but it is a good idea so that potential members can see what is going on and how interesting your site is and what content you have.

2.) I would think so as spiders are classified as guests.

Do you have a link to your site, I think you forgot to post one.

[- Ryan -]

Hello,

If I were you, I would allow guests to view the boards completely. When just starting your forum this is imperative, as while I don't have any accurate statistics, it seems you will get about 1 new member per 1000 pageviews. By limiting access to the boards, people will only view the index and not register. Having no access to the boards will also cause search engines to not index your site properly. I think this is a very poor idea personally, but it's your own choice.

[dDOTr2]

1.) You don't have to but it is a good idea so that potential members can see what is going on and how interesting your site is and what content you have.

2.) I would think so as spiders are classified as guests.

Do you have a link to your site, I think you forgot to post one.

First of all thanks for both of u ppl for spending your time. Yeah i agree and my site URL is at my sig itself anyway its www.digout.net and plz bro do suggest me wat ever u think.

Hello,

If I were you, I would allow guests to view the boards completely. When just starting your forum this is imperative, as while I don't have any accurate statistics, it seems you will get about 1 new member per 1000 pageviews. By limiting access to the boards, people will only view the index and not register. Having no access to the boards will also cause search engines to not index your site properly. I think this is a very poor idea personally, but it's your own choice.

Ye, i agree with both of you and again i opened the closed boards except some three boards where many cool video tutorials, ebooks which are exclusively uploaded by me to various file servers are present.