Disallowing guests to view the forum is one of the biggest mistake that a forum administrator could ever commit. I will highlight a few points in this post which will give you an idea that how harmful is this step for your forums.

What actually do forum owners think when they take this step?

The only plan a forum owner could have when they take this step of disallowing guests to view the forums(Force Registration) is to make the forum even more active with many more member registrations. They tend to think that most of the visitors coming to the forum are going to register on their forums and become an active member and add to the activity of the forums. Apart from this I don’t think there is anything else that one can think before taking this step.

Does this actually work?

Definitely not. Did you also think that it could ever work? To be honest, instead of helping, it will destroy your forum completely. A lot of webmasters have made this blunder and have lost their forum. This is sad but a true fact. Never ever do this mistake with your forum unless you really want it to die.

Did you know that no body wants to register anywhere unless they are sure that a forum is worth joining? Only a handful join such a forum where there is a forced registration. 90% of the cases, a visitor coming to your forum through a search engine or any link from other site would just hit the back button or close the browser instead of registering on your forum to view the content. Think yourself! Would you want to register on any community without knowing what goes inside? If the forum is fit for you or not? If the forum is worth joining? Registration is a pain which can only be handled if it is worth. This step back stabs rather than helping your forum. If you already own an active forum and take this step thinking that you will get even more registrations, then I can guarantee you that you are going to see a sharp decline in the amount of registrations and also the activity. Be sure that 20-30% of the activity in an active community is due to the new members, which you are going to lose everyday. Eventually the old members will either become busy with life or get bored or might quit and join a better forum by noticing the sharp decline in the activity at your forums. Eventually in a few months, your forum will die. I will share a good example with you at the end of the post.

Also note that when you block guests from viewing the forums, you actually block the search engine bots from indexing your forums(threads, posts etc). Most of the visitors that would come to your site are going to come from search engines, and if you don’t let them to index your site in their database, you are infact harming your forum rather than making it better. I own an active forum and the only reason it is active is due to Google. If any of you own an active community then you know what I am talking about.

An Example

The first ever forum I had joined is globalboards.com. Which was a Daniel Radcliffe+Harry Potter+Chit Chat Forum. It was quite active, it had around 220k posts. I am talking about 2005 May. I really liked that forum and had a lot of friends there. But then the administrator of the forums blocked the guests and SE Bots to view the forum and started forcing registrations on visitors. Eventually the forum died. Today, after 2.5+ years, the forum has only gained 55k posts and just because of the old active members. But seeing the activity downfall, most of the active members left the forum and now only a few are left. The member count has hardly increased. I am sure that the forum would have had been doing absolutely great if he had allowed guests and search engine to view the content of the forum. The attempt to make the forum better killed the community. Even today the administrator has failed to realise what caused the downfall of the forum. Since it was my first ever forum, I decided to give personal suggestions to the administrator explaining everything but he ignored each and every suggestion of mine and said I am fooling around. Though he gave me fake thanks for the suggestions, I know he must be laughing at my tips. I pity the admin. Either he is too ignorant or stupid or he doesn’t care for his forum. Anyway, it is not my problem. The reason I love that site is because of that very forum I got the idea to start my own teen forums, and today I own one of the most active teen communities.

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