Dealing with Off Topic posts or not

[MapleOne]

As a guest, I can just tell you that would infuriate me and incentivize me to leave immediately

Our board caters to people in a specific business, there is no other board like it in Canada. To succesfully compete in that business you virtually have to read past 6 posts. Only option is to join or move on, if you decide to move on you cannot participate in pre auction discussions and will probably not know who is bidding on what.

Member count went up immediately when I implemented that policy. Mind you its a small industry but highly specialized.

 

[smallwheels]

Member count went up immediately when I implemented that policy.

I am wondering if this is a helpful KPI - sure, if people have to sign up to be able to see the content more people will sign up. But does this also raise contributions/active participation and, even more important, high quality posts and discussions? Or does this just create an even higher percentage of lurkers than normal?

Possibly, given the specific nature of your forum and topic, it may work pretty well for you. On a more generic view I am a bit undecided:

If I visit a forum as an unregistred user on the hunt for information and have to register w/o knowing what to expect I'll probably leave (at least if there is an alternative source of information). That's what I personally did often in the past. The less I could see the higher the probability that I would just leave as I did not liked being "tricked" or "forced" into becoming a registered member w/o proof if it would be worth it.

On the other hand: In my own forum we do have certain parts only accessible for registered members. Initially, it was to foster registrations, in the meantime also to lock out AI-training-bots and scrapers from the high quality content areas aside from the discussions. I do see that a certain amount of users do register to access these content areas (i.e. resources, full size images etc.), but I also see that about half of my registered users never posted anything (0 posts). This has been like that more or less since the start of the forum. How is that percentage on your forum and has it changed over the years / with the changes in policy?

 

[MapleOne]

Keep in mind that addon was originally made so you can read only the first post, by changing that to allow 6 posts the reader has a pretty good understanding if the topic is of interest or not. So anyone signing up actually wants to read further.

 

[smallwheels]

Keep in mind that addon was originally made so you can read only the first post, by changing that to allow 6 posts the reader has a pretty good understanding if the topic is of interest or not. So anyone signing up actually wants to read further.

As I said: May work perfectly on your forum for your needs/situation. For me personally it wouldn't, as long as there are other ways to get information about the topic. Especially not on a forum - it would maybe work on a very high quality research page or such.

Still I am interested in changes that happend through this policy and general percentage of lukers:

I also see that about half of my registered users never posted anything (0 posts). This has been like that more or less since the start of the forum. How is that percentage on your forum and has it changed over the years / with the changes in policy?

As my forum is non-commercial and we don't even have ads I am not too keen on getting more users than I already get. It is just not a very important KPI for us. Sure it's nice, but it also is more work and I already see that with a broader audience and a somewhat more anonymous forum through this the number of people that kind of "misbehave" or are hit and run posters, not caring for the forum culture, does rise unproportionally.

So for my situation I made the decision to keep general information (including most discussion forums) publically accessible while special and very in detail information is accessible only for people that are logged in. So registering clearly brings additional value (which people realize quickly), however, you don't have to register in most cases if you only want a general overview.

It would be interesting to see what effect an approach like your's would have on my forum - however, it is probably better not to fool around. Other than that I am wondering what it does to your visibility in search engines? Most new users come via Google to us - if everything is blocked probably Google does not rank the forum very well would be my (naive) assumption?

 

[MapleOne]

am wondering what it does to your visibility in search engines?

Thats actually why I changed it from 1 to 6 posts. On our sites the important stuff, auction results, lists, names and most everything of importance is at the beginning of the topic so I have not noticed a difference in my google ranking. The same amount of threads show up on site:domain as before I did that.