SuperYodaMan wrote:I agree with shinja. Why disable guests? There's absolutely no reason to; guests can't post on the forum, and how is BlooMilk going to keep expanding if it doesn't allow public traffic to check out the core of the site's discussions?
"Absolutely no reason to" - careful, blanket statements like that will get you into trouble. There are several reasons to consider it. Let me enumerate some of them for you.
1. Protecting against trolls. Forcing a registration to read material helps control posters who make accounts just to troll a forum. You may not buy this, but the vast evidence of plenty of forum histories say otherwise. Trolls utilize guest reading to find their targets, then make dummy accounts and go to town when they see a weak spot. It adds to number 2.
2. It makes bannings an actual penalty, which in turn, helps maintain number 1.
3. Protects the site from losing it's material - it likely doesn't matter much, but an easy example would be a WotC employee or an LFL viewing the site and seeing material they don't want present and starting a lawsuit. Sure, they could just make and activate and account and do the same, but it happens more often in "Guest mode".
4. Giving a real number of unique visitors for forum counts. Many if not most of the "guests" are internet software and search engine stuff, as well as a single person using different IPs as a guest (say at home vs work vs school which could easily look like 3+ unique users to a forum counter). Generally, the biggest reason forum hosts allow guests is for the opposite reason, to artificially inflate their forum count numbers for a couple of key reasons. Number 1 is for advertising (not the case on Bloomilk). Number 2 is for search engine results. These aren't bad things mind you, but take a look at
www.swminigames.com for an example of someone who is ripping off their sponsors by doing so. There are reasons to want a "real number" as well, which is why I mention it as a reason someone would not allow guests.
5. Stronger control of the forums in general. It's much easier to track IPs and keep up with trouble makers when they can't read the material without making an account.
Finally, as for your reason to not do so, "expanding" well that's easily solved. Some people do like to browse a forum before becoming a member, true enough, and can get annoyed by having to join to do so. But to say it prevents expansion is just plain wrong in this case. This is a very niche market website, and the people coming here are here for a reason. The new people coming here join up because they play the game, or are starting to play, etc. I'm pretty sure you could count on about two hands the people who would not join bloomilk if it disabled guests, might be even less.
With all that said, I'm not really partial to having guests or not, I generally prefer not, but it's certainly not an issue I would take Aaron to task on either. There are other much more fundamental issues with the bloomilk forum that he needs to address. And I fully support his choice as the owner to go either way, as it's not a particularly strong issue either way. But the counter case had to be made so that people would see that there are more sides to this than, "absolutely no reason". :)