Why are most forums marked as private?

[admin]

You need to be a registered user of the forum to be able to see the content of most forums.

 

You DO NOT need a software license to request forum membership and contribute to existing topics or even start a topic of your own.

 

Anyone can request a membership to this forum.

 

Your email is safe, we absolutely will not sell and/or give away your email or personal information to 3rd party organizations, under any circumstances, ever!

 

The only reason unregistered guests are prevented access to see forum content is to keep robots out as they increase site traffic; it increases page views and drives forum maintenance cost up.

 

Thank you,

 

Guylain

[s3igell]

The only reason unregistered guests are prevented access to see forum content is to keep robots out as they increase site traffic; it increases page views and drives forum maintenance cost up.

 

While one can understand this approach, especially as BackyardEOS / BinaryRivers is footing the cost to run this new Forum resource, the downside is that blocking Search Crawler Bots from the major Search Engines (Google, et al) means we users cannot leverage those Search Results to cast as wide a net as possible for BYEOS-related posts and hints and answers that include consolidated responses from THIS Forum as well as the several other Forums (CN, AF.net, even the old Yahoo Group).  And, as you'd advised there was no plausible Export/Import of the BackyardEOS Yahoo Group into this new Forum, it seems that Google Search Results would provide the closest approximation.  Perhaps there is a feature of the Forum Search facility that allows you to script a "site: constrained" Google Search of the old Yahoo Group when a search of the new Forum retunrs an empty set ??

 

(Of course, such a concern might be a bit premature and simply a consequence of the new Forum being so NEW that there is almost nothing in the Search Indexes for a number of test searchs...)

[admin]

Yeah, I know.  I have 500,000 monthly page views included with the forum base monthly subscription... then I pay $0.10 for each additional 1,000 page views.  If after a month or two I'm not even close to the limit I will open for forum in read only mode for guests... which will make it visible to search crawlers and will get indexed.

 

Thank you

 

Guylain

 

 

 

 

[fmhill]

Why not have some sort of temporary guest registration that it would be relatively easy such as entering a user name/iD and simply clicking on one of the encoded image fields and have to type in a 5 digit/character code in order to have view of the support forum. This would not require a full registration and yet would stop the robots from running amok. Only people with a real interest would bother to decode the image and enter the code. this temporary registration could be good for 7 days or less, your choice...

[admin]

I have 500,000 page views per month with the forum subscription.

 

After 3 months of operation we are averaging about 35,000 page views per month.

 

With all that -room- left, 465,000 page views, I have decided to open up all forum in read only for guests.  This will allow search engines to index all posts.

 

Thank you for making this support forum a success.  In barely 3 months we have over 700 members.

[s3igell]

Congratulations on the first 3 months of a very successful transition to this Forum.

I've been impressed by the level of interaction, civility, and "on-topic-ness"...

 

It appears that this format has been rather conducive to the ongoing BYN Beta.   And I hope / expect the same for the pending BYE 3.1 release.

 

I hope that the Search Engines will draw a few additional users and New Customers, but at the same time don't bring any problems with the additional exposure...