Content is king, but....

[Stoker 4.0]

Content is king, but....
We need people to help creating the content.

You have the board, you have content and you have lots of guests visiting.
Well, its nice to have guests enjoying your content. But as long they are guests, they cant contribute with anything.
We need them to register and login. Then they are ready to help you being the king of content

You can limit downloads to active users, limit guests reading to first post only.
But Im not sure limiting content is a good idea.

I have startet an experiment with google ads. Displayed to guests only with a message: Login or Register to skip ads
i will run the experiment for a month and see if I get any result.


How do you handle this thing about getting guests to register and login?

[SpIdErPiGgY]

I have a forum with Dutch translations for extensions.
The board is 1.5 year old now with just a very few members (14).
None of them are active or post messages.
Believe me , I tried everything to become more populair.... Nothing works.. Even social media is not working.

I know there are lots of Dutch people who uses the phpBB software, but still nothing...

At the moment I'm ready to give up...
I spend hours of time in those translations in a week.
Give my money away on the server and stuff...
I just feel all that work is pointless...

I said this many times... Social media like Facebook killed the forums... Exept the ones that where already populair.

[thecoalman]

You can limit downloads to active users, limit guests reading to first post only.

Make sure if you are doing this the guests and regular bots are getting same limited content. There is also ways to indicate to bots it's behind login/paywall so you can let them index the entire page.

For Google's ads bot the rules are going to be different but I'm not so sure how you would handle this. I guess it's moot point in your case if the ads are not displaying on full page. Treat it the same as regular bot with partial content.

Quick tip here, you can create custom bots group. If for example you had a forum where bots have no access you can create "Ad Bots" group to give it access even behind login. The one caveat is the user agent can be spoofed giving unregistered user access, you can add the IP's to the bots setup page to prevent spoofing.

[thecoalman]

Exept the ones that where already populair.

It's more than popularity, you need a niche. There is a forum I'm member going back to early 2000's even before I had my own forum. 2 or 3 million high quality posts. It was the place to be in the early 2000's for webmaster related content. It's a ghost town today, they are in a over-saturated market.

[Stoker 4.0]

Im not sure its a good idea to display different content for bots, unless it is less content.

I will stick with the ad for guests and see what happens.
I chose ads because they annoy everybody.
But it could be an image of just text.

[thecoalman]

Im not sure its a good idea to display different content for bots, unless it is less content.

For the regular bots indexing content for their search 100% correct.

For Googles ads bot the rules are slightly different because it's only indexing the page so it can display a relevant ad. If you look in Googles documentation you can even give it credentials for content behind a login. You do not need to do that with phpBB because you can just use the permissions.

For example if you have chit chat forum you have denied bots group access because you don't want it showing up in search. You can give Googles ad bot access to it so it can display relevant ads.In my case I had private forum only available to registered users.

The one caveat is do not do this if you truly want it private because someone can spoof the user agent.

[Stoker 4.0]

Im not sure its a good idea to display different content for bots, unless it is less content.

For the regular bots indexing content for their search 100% correct.

For Googles ads bot the rules are slightly different because it's only indexing the page so it can display a relevant ad. If you look in Googles documentation you can even give it credentials for content behind a login. You do not need to do that with phpBB because you can just use the permissions.

For example if you have chit chat forum you have denied bots group access because you don't want it showing up in search. You can give Googles ad bot access to it so it can display relevant ads.In my case I had private forum only available to registered users.

The one caveat is do not do this if you truly want it private because someone can spoof the user agent.

Thanks, now I get your point