Guests on the forum

How does it work for guests to come on the forum ?? I assume they don’t have to be members ? So perhaps a stupid question but what do members get that guests don’t ? And what’s the purpose of guests being able to come on hear without membership ? I have tried to go on other forums non window cleaning related and have been unable to unless I join as a member and in some cases they want you to pay a subscription as well , @Gav is this something you have looked at to help finance the forum ??? 

Indeed and this has been discussed at length many times. In short we as any site rely on ranking in Google to get traffic and people finding and using the forum.

If we shut it down and make it member only, then we essentially will be removing ourselves from all search engines. Basically if guests can not see content neither can Google or other search engines. No traffic means the site would only last as long as the current members interest. 

The only benefit, apart from posting inane rubbish, guilty your Honour, members get is the logged in area. 

Members do get the private member forum section as well as personal message functionality. The ability to post and reply to topics, have a profile and so on. Guests can read and that's it. 

I found another last week, whilst bored so had quick search, came across one were after I had read 3-4 posts, it blocked me from reading anymore with a message to say I had reached my limit and prompted me to sign up, could this work for us ?

I have used this before but not continuously. I used to enable it for a day or so then turn off again. Reason being is most won't register and just go else where to get the anser to their question rather than register. This in turn also doesn't help the bounce rate on the forum which google uses as a metric to determin if your website is answering the searchers question. 

If people come on have a couple of page views then bounce (leave) it indicates that our site is not answering their questions and google could downrank us.