Advice wanted

[nuberry]

If I require guests to login before they can see content , then i lose the social links.

Social links are extremely important at this time , so how do i get people to register and not just surf my site and keep the  social links.

Why would they register if all the content is available, I really need to find a solution by preventing people from watching content without registering , but also keeping the social links

 

please

 

[Morrigan]

I think if you remove "View" permissions from things you want people to share then it should do that. You can even setup a "custom error" when a guest tries to access your forums and has access to see the forum but not view the topics. You even have the ability to show them the topic list but not the content within.

[Rob.]

It really comes down to a balance nuberry. The issues are two fold:

Force registration before seeing the content: People won't register because they want to see what you have to offer before they register to see whether it's worth it. If they spend their time registering, then find it's an empty forum, they've wasted their time, and now have an account on a forum they have no intention of returning to.

Allowing guests to see all the content: Unless it's content that they want to reply to, you'll find they'll just turn up, read all your content, then disappear again, and your forum will look like it had no visits because there's no posts.

As Morrigan previously suggested, you could do it so that they can see all the front page categories and forum names, but not the content inside them, and use a custom message to tell guests to register to see it that way. But even that is a little risky...some people want to read everything before they decide whether they want to register to participate.

Of course the main thing is that if your content is good enough to encourage debate then they will register to comment on it, but some people are a ready only kind of visitor and just don't feel the need to post anything.

[AndyF]

I'd give thought to perhaps using a third party addon to restrict viewing to say the first post (or two) in each topic. This way if they like what they read they'll register and maybe even participate.

An alternative type would be one that allowed you to read x number of topics before showing you a message to register to view more. Although they are easily circumvented as they are going to use either an IP or cookie based method to 'check' I'd expect most viewers who are interested to register.

I've not checked the Marketplace for availability of these type of addons for 4x although some do exist for the 3x series so its likely they are available or may be soon.