Opening the forum to 'outsiders'

[allenuk]

I know this was briefly discussed a couple of months ago, but something the other day made me think...

I pop into two other forums as well as this, and spend a fair bit of time in the other places advising new or potential amputees about what will happen to them. I see this as one of my roles in life, certainly as much as helping existing amputees cope with the world.

But we don't get them here! I think this is mainly due to the fact that unless you get a personal recommendation, or happen across the Facebook amputee-online page, no-one knows we're here, so if someone is Googling for help as a soon-to-be amputee, they don't find us.

I know the down-side, which is that we'd be in for loads more spam and devotee traffic, but I think a well-organised site, like ours, can cope with that.

So, I'm proposing that we open the portals and let ourselves be Googled.

I'm a democrat (SMALL D) at heart, so will go will whatever the majority want - it's our site, not my site!

Allen, bka, London.

[ann58]

I know we do not have very much traffic or new people on this forum...if that is the way to go, do it. I will not object.

[ampgk]

I don't follow the other forums to any great extent, but it seems even the HM forum has problems generating message traffic. It may be that amps just aren't a chatty bunch. OTOH, I note a great deal of variability in message traffic on some of the non-amputee mailing lists to which I subscribe, and some of them have sizable subscriber counts.

I have no problem with opening the forum for global read-only access (I think this is the proposal) for a trial period to see how things work out.

[billf]

Allen: I am assuming the you control the switch to allow Google and others to crawl the contents of our message board. If that be the case, and you can turn the switch off if the results are not of the groups liking, try it. BillF

[stonecutter]

We can all rest assured though, that any undesirables can be removed with about six clicks or so...

Also, billf, yes... the gate can be closed about as fast as it can be opened... Nothing is irreversible.

[snowyh]

I'm in favor of opening the board.

Helen

[cherylm]

There's always a small "core" of active members on these things...but we do seem to be an exceptionally small and tasteful core. I actually kind of miss some of the debates that would develop with Ian's group...my only problem was with the insane amount of spam the site started receiving, and Ian's "up-and-down" status.

If we can pull back if things get too wild on that front, I'm all in favor of opening things up!

[ann-]

I think it would be good too, in fact I hadn't realized it wasn't open to everyone.

[stonecutter]

So... I will make the change effective immediately.

Guests will be able to come in and see what we have within our walls, in the general area. They will not be able to see the moderator's section or ladies' secton without registering and having those access privileges applied to their account by an administrator. They won't be able to post or reply to anything - unless they register an account, which will still require an administrator to approve their application.

Sound good?

[stonecutter]

UPDATE: I updated the request to Google to have our forums registered and within two minutes we had "guests" listed in the currently online section. There were two of them from similar IP addresses. When I did a search for who owns the IP address, this is what I found:



So... We'll see what happens.

[allenuk]

Thanks stonecutter. There have been a lot of 'guests' on the statistics since you've pressed the button, although as yet we've had no new members. As you say, we'll see what happens...


Allen.

[billf]

I have found one google index entry to our forum today, it is pointing to the cycling thread started by Allen. I have not tried any other of the web crawlers to see if they have indexed anything regarding our forum.

[stonecutter]

I've registered the site with a whole bunch of other search engines as well. Hopefully it will generate the desired traffic levels.

[ampgk]

Maybe one of the admins could get a guest shot on MTV -- seems to have led to a spike in new signups on one of the other amp forums.

[allenuk]

Why an 'admin'? Why not any of our keen and good-looking correspondents?


Allen.