Guests Viewing the Forums

[DarkCloud]

Dear Markos and Dan,

When I am not logged in and am viewing the forums only as a Guest, I can only see topics from the past 10 days. When I attempt to see older topics or topics buried more than a page deep in, for instance, the OT- I cannot search that.

While I can understand some rationale (bandwith) for not allowing Guests to view this information- could you at least pop up an explanation of why they cannot see this... as it is frustrating for people not familiar with the site... and it is also off-putting if someone is attempting to look something up.

Does anyone else here have a similar difficulty, or similar opinions?

-DC.

[1889]

I would never view these boards without logging in. Its unatural to be skulking around like that.
I have nothing to hide,
I am proud to be a subscriber
and post on here with my head held high.

[DarkCloud]

But people who want to look something up, but don't say- want to enter their password on someone elses' or a public computer- wouldn't login.

[Kuciwalker]

Or just people who are new to the site. And it's not like someone would try to be a guest to avoid showing up on the list on the main forum page - you can set that in your CP.

[snoopy369]

Or say you're just looking for some Civ information, like strategy info or somesuch? Many people actually do things like this ... certainly I do on other sites if Poly doesn't have the info I need, and I rarely log in anywhere (I have a login in CFC, I think, but that's it)...

[Kuciwalker]

A guest trying to look up actually useful information, won't be able to find it (I'm thinking mostly about newbies) because most of the threads are much more than 10 days old.

[Dr. Nick]

Guests are evil and steal our bandwidth!

[Last Conformist]

I'm always logged in, but there couldn't be any harm in telling them why they can't see older posts.

[Alex]

telling them why could annoy them or... be an incentive for them to register.

[jan543]

Got to agree to the original post. Tell those people why they cant get acess to the older threads. I have been thinking it was some kind of error on apolytons side, for some month until i realized that i had to register to see older threads, Maybe there are more people which arent that familiar with computers and the internet to realize this at once.

[H Tower]

those people who aren't familar with "computers or the internet" don't come here.

[DarkCloud]

I would think they would-

I for one couldn't figure out what was going on the first time this happened to me... and I 'know' apolyton.

[Martin Gühmann]

Re: Guests Viewing the Forums

Originally posted by DarkCloud
Does anyone else here have a similar difficulty, or similar opinions?

Yes. If I remember correctly I reported this deffect, ages ago, or maybe it was a similar behavour of the Apolyton Directory.

Originally posted by DarkCloud
While I can understand some rationale (bandwith) for not allowing Guests to view this information- could you at least pop up an explanation of why they cannot see this... as it is frustrating for people not familiar with the site... and it is also off-putting if someone is attempting to look something up.

Actual I cannot quite follow this bandwidth argument, because I don't think that it saves so much. Of course some recent numbers would be very helpful. But I don't see why it should save bandwidth to allow guests to click on all these buttons just for a reload. It would save more to remove all these nice buttons that are useless for guests anyway.

-Martin

[MarkG]

the restrictions where created when our server could not hold as much people as today, in order to provide a better browsing experience for registered users

i'll see what can be done....

[H Tower]

make them register, you can talk up your ad sales with, "14,000 people registered on my site in the last 2 months" or "we've had 40,000 active users in the last 2 months."

It seems like everywhere you go on the internet these days, you have to login to see content that is kept hidden from everyone else. Poly need be no different.