I think? there may be some confusion about what open viewing means.
We have had open viewing ever since the landslide vote
here. However, I made a change a little over a year ago to limit the open viewing to the first 500+ characters of the replying posts. Most posts were less than 500 characters, so this information has always been public. The limitation was put in to try and drive additional revenue by encouraging people to pay to read the full posts.
Open viewing also does not mean that others can post without being a paid member. Nothing has changed here. There are the exact same 5 "open forums" that we have had for a long time.
In addition, the "full member" forum is still entirely private, as it always has been. It is not indexable by search engines. As always, please do feel free to post more sensitive or private information in this area.
I doubt the full open viewing will change much of anything in terms of posting. The only reason I changed it back to full open viewing is because it didn't seem to be making much of a difference in the number of people joining up. In fact, I was often receiving annoying emails about wanting to be able to fully see what they were buying before they pay. What can you say? Everyone still thinks the internet is free. But, that is not the reason for changing it, either. I do not think this will lead to more people paying to join. Would be great if it helped, but not the point.
So, why bother?
Well, I think it makes the site look a little cleaner to potential new members. I also think it may improve overall traffic because google will be able to index the full post and not just the first 500 characters or so. As you can probably tell we have made a lot of effort to try and start earning revenue more through advertising and products. Because, if it was up to paid memberships alone, this site would have had to close down a long time ago.
This site is a great site, imho. I like the pro orientation of the site. In no way am I trying to change this. In fact, I really don't have paid membership as my main priority for the site anymore. I really view it as a nice collection of pro minded folks who have a lot to share. I like the slow, but steady organic growth that we have.
The goal is not to increase the post count or membership numbers. Yes, I think I've finally made my peace with that. Quality is what we have and I would like it to stay that way.
To me it isn't that big of a deal, really. At the end of the day, I'm not sure it will make that much difference in traffic, either.
Does everyone want to have a new vote? I'm happy to turn partial viewing back on if that is what most paying members prefer.
) I'm sure I post a few things that annoy people as much as I get annoyed, but controversy when kept civil is almost always good.
Linear Mode
