Unregistered, un-logged-in: read subject line only, or whole post?

both options have their advantages

[tsheridan]

I have my vBulletin forum set up so that unregistered & un-logged-in people can read the subject lines of every post, but not read the body of the post itself, until they log in.

I figured that that way, they might be enticed to register to read the rest of the thread after reading the interesting subject lines. It seems to work well sometimes, but I'm also aware that sometimes people would be more inclined to join if they could read the whole thread first and found some interesting ideas.

I'd appreciate hearing your personal opinions on this.

[Grassroots]

As a user I would find that annoying and I know in the past, any experiment I have done with forums in the same vain, hasn't really worked.

May I suggest opening up your forum to guests and allowing them to read or even post comments?

To entice them into registering, don't allow them to start topics, upload an avatar etc.

Use teasers like "Register FREE today to recieve full forum benefits" etc.

Try that, see where it gets you. I find that route to be pretty much a successful way of getting new sign-ups to an otherwise dormant forum and it has never failed me in the past.

Good luck.

[rogerd]

I agree, you'll turn off lurkers. You'll also greatly impair the performance of your forum in search engines, unless you do user-agent testing and let bots see the whole thing. This will further irritate searchers, though, and might be a bad thing if someone complains to Google et al.

At least let guests read most of the forum. If you want to have a members-only area, that's fine too. Letting guests post may be problematic in the long run, but while your forum is small it may help build out your content. If spam or abuse pick up, force would-be posters to register.