Moderated Forum

[Corker]

Bill- Please change my vote from "no" to "yes."

I still don't want to visit 3 discussion areas in order to find out who went fishing and how he did, but I dislike lurkers even more. Fortunately, I don't encounter too many of these people (probably because they did read my threads and decided it would be smarter to follow Tapout instead!), and hope to keep it that way.

I'm happy to contribute to any discussion where everybody shares some of what they know--and they don't even have to put a hook in the water to provide some of the most useful information. If someone has simply driven by a lake, it saves me a 2 hour (or longer) round trip if he posts a report that it's too high or low to launch, full of grass, frozen, or muddy.

For anyone who's still undecided, here are a couple of points to consider.

The site statistics about "users," "members," and "guests" are misleading. Most "guests" are not lurkers and lurkers aren't always "guests." To me, a "lurker" is someone who quietly takes and uses information contributed by others--with no intention to reciprocate. The vBulletin software that powers this site calls anything that isn't a registered user a "guest." That includes the thousands of search engines that spider active sites like C.c continuously. It appears that vBulletin reports that each user is "online" for 60 minutes after the latest hit. If the total number of "guests" includes the past 60-minutes-worth of search engine bot hits, that explains why this number is always so high. Sure, there may be a few real, live lurkers on the list, but nowhere near as many as this statistic implies. As I thought through this, however, I realized the not-so-bad news may be bad after all. Search engines index site content and that's how many users find C.c in the first place. So, when we post today about our favorite fishing holes, links to those pages attract strangers for many years.

A "moderated forum" is only accessible to registered members. Yes, anyone can register and quickly meet the minimum-number-of-posts requirement. The important point that I missed at first is that anyone does not include anything...search engine spiders can't register as members and that means vBulletin locks them out of the moderated areas. A quick test, using the NC moderated forum, confirmed that Google has no idea that this content exists.

[Barnacle Bill]

Bill- Please change my vote from "no" to "yes."

I still don't want to visit 3 discussion areas in order to find out who went fishing and how he did, but I dislike lurkers even more. Fortunately, I don't encounter too many of these people (probably because they did read my threads and decided it would be smarter to follow Tapout instead!), and hope to keep it that way.

I'm happy to contribute to any discussion where everybody shares some of what they know--and they don't even have to put a hook in the water to provide some of the most useful information. If someone has simply driven by a lake, it saves me a 2 hour (or longer) round trip if he posts a report that it's too high or low to launch, full of grass, frozen, or muddy.

For anyone who's still undecided, here are a couple of points to consider.

The site statistics about "users," "members," and "guests" are misleading. Most "guests" are not lurkers and lurkers aren't always "guests." To me, a "lurker" is someone who quietly takes and uses information contributed by others--with no intention to reciprocate. The vBulletin software that powers this site calls anything that isn't a registered user a "guest." That includes the thousands of search engines that spider active sites like C.c continuously. It appears that vBulletin reports that each user is "online" for 60 minutes after the latest hit. If the total number of "guests" includes the past 60-minutes-worth of search engine bot hits, that explains why this number is always so high. Sure, there may be a few real, live lurkers on the list, but nowhere near as many as this statistic implies. As I thought through this, however, I realized the not-so-bad news may be bad after all. Search engines index site content and that's how many users find C.c in the first place. So, when we post today about our favorite fishing holes, links to those pages attract strangers for many years.

A "moderated forum" is only accessible to registered members. Yes, anyone can register and quickly meet the minimum-number-of-posts requirement. The important point that I missed at first is that anyone does not include anything...search engine spiders can't register as members and that means vBulletin locks them out of the moderated areas. A quick test, using the NC moderated forum, confirmed that Google has no idea that this content exists.

I can't physically change it but will remember at the final count. You make some good points.

[Barnacle Bill]

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