Ideas: Content visible only if you login/reply

[Maltz]

Recently I noticed an increasing number of forums adapting a similar system: Valuable posts has restrictions attached at the judgement of the moderator. The user has to be a forum member in order to see the content. Even more restrictive posts requires the user to actually reply first for the selected content to become visible.

The former way is likely an approach to increase membership. People generally do not mind to register in a forum if they find a good number of quality works there. After people become members, they are more willing to post something. So we are essentially saleperson who comes in people's house - once they agree to let us in to do demo, they are more likely to buy that ultra-expensive knife set. This is actually not a bad way to promote participation - if we actually have the quality works that justify this restrictive treatment. But the forum might be branded as "stingy", "secretive", or "not different from a door-to-door salesman".

The latter is actually a paradox - how do I know what to reply if I have not read the content? Naturally we will have threads that receive hundreds even thousands of replies and appears red hot, but maybe only 1% of the replies are actually meaningful, as the user bothered to go back to edit their originally meaingless reply to something more meaningful like "This is great work, thanks!" or "What a scam! * you!". The inventor of this strange system probably wants some way to seriously promote a post so it is constantly bumped to the top by curious users. But why can't they just make it a sticky is beyond my comprehension.

I am not suggesting that we should do those crazy things, but these are ideas that we can think of to encourage participation. Hiding an already open-content post would be evil, but we might be able to try it on new contents that the author may voluntariily agree to the terms as a well-intended experiment. We might be albe to increase some forum participation down the road this way.

What do you think?

[Husar]

I'm ambiguous/undecided about the registration part.

Concerning the post to be made to see the content, I think it's that you have to have a postcount of one in general, not in that particular thread.
Whether that is useful in any way I'm not sure though, sounds a bit like an unnecessary hurdle.

[Andres]

I must admit that I've been toying with the idea of making certain content visible for members only. I'm not sure. On the one hand, it may lead to more people register and the occasional post. On the other hand, it might also result in people looking at our site, not finding anything and leaving again. Or go to some other place where they can find similar information without the hassle of registering an account. While, if the content here would've been available, they might have signed up.

I don' tknow if it's technically possible to make content viewable partially. Take the frogbeastegg TW:S2 guide. I'm not sure if it's possible to make the first two chapters of it visible and require registration to read the rest. Genre "liked what you saw so far? Then register here to read the rest". Perhaps permanent links or articles on the frontpage or so.

How does the rest of the membership feels about this?

[Peasant Phill]

It's a valuable suggestion, Maltz, but I'm against it.

We need more members, members usualy lurk before registering and if lurkers can't see anything 'valuable' I don't believe they will register.
Though please provide some examples of website who do use this so I can contact them. Perhaps I'm wrong.

[Catiline]

having to log in to view content is a complete menace.

[Maltz]

Is it possible to make an entire thread members only (or the first post of the thread)? Not logged in users will see the name of the thread, but when they click on it they get a message asking them to login.

I understand there are plenty of reasons maintaining the openness of information. But when I see there are 7 members and 200 unregistered users browsing the ORG, I see potential membership. If we can figure out some other way to increase registration...