my site http://gamefront.us gets a good amount of visitors, and i was wondering if it would be a good or bad thing to make it so they have to register to read the forums. Would it make people say "Scr*w this" Or would a lot register?
Yes what gult said. This way there is incentive to sign up to see the posts they can not see otherwise. Shawn
You could provide a 'guest' as the username and password. Just notify new users though your website. I don't know much about this, but there are many "DEMO" websites, that allow you to try out content without registering.
I say no. If you do that, I for one do not sign up for anything until I know what it is all about. It is the urge to post that encourages a person to join. Also if you are advertising on your forum, visitors click ads and visit links also. Make you forum as friendly as possible and people will want to join. If you try to keep them out from the start, you will not entice anyone to stay. There are many many forums out there, most would avoid the ons they can not even see the posts without joining.
There are hundreds of game forums they could go to, If you've got a vistitor you wanna rope him in and make it as inviting as possible
If you are concerned about getting the registrations and you are confident you have good, interesting content, maybe install the hack that limits a guest to viewing X number of threads before they have to register? Set it to a higher number (10 or so) so they get a good feel for the community.
If a forum requires me to register just to view the posts, I would just use Goggle to search for another forum.