Hey guys, I have a dog forum, http://www.listendog.com/forum/ and I do not know whether I should make people sign up to view the posts, or let them browse the forum as a guest. The reason I am asking for help is simple, many times have I seen quite a few guests on, but none of them really ever join. I am just looking foer a bit of advice. In addition, I tried to see what it looked like if they had to sign up, and it has this horribles "WARNING, YOU MUST LOGIN OR REGISTER" blah blah blah and to be honest, it looks horrible. I am using SMF and was wondering if anybody know which fole I would edit to change it. Many Thanks.
i don't see any reason to not let guests read your site (unless there is some secret information on there somehow) and example of secret info is I have a client with a fishing website that lists good place to go fish in 'state'. When the site was viewable...people started going to those places and killing the ponds off. Now they made it a paid member only section (not the entire forum, just that one section)...and people get lots of fish there now. So if you have a real reason like that to do it, go for it....but if not...guests count as impressions just as well as registered members
Let them read. If anything, you are also allowing web crawlers to access the content, which is good for SEO.