Should Guests be allowed to post on the forum?

[Angmar]

Many, many forums are presently registered posting only. It rather simplifies a few things, though as the master troll who posted previously has noticed, there are still ways around for a creative soul. That just leaves the idiots, which is a good place to start anyways

[banmicrosofttoo]

lol i dont consider myself a master troll. there are people better than i am. have you ever been on a site where it asks for you to type in random letters, numbers, or a random phrase. trolls figured out how to make automated crapflooders which would register loads of usernames and post on a board with proxies, eventually filling up the forum with nonsense.


i've seen forums get trolled so bad the admins just closed the board down for a few days and turned off the new user registration. the official slipknot forum for the band is closed because of people making fun of slipknot for complaining about burger king's chicken fries commercial and slipknot's "likeness" of the fake band on the commercial.


watch out if you want to start a band because if you wear masks and those masks have dreadlocks, kabuki mask, or anything else "like" slipknot, you will get sued.

[cathodraytube]

i definantley think onley registerd users should be able to poast, the volume of crap that the "trolls" put on here is getting redickulus, i remember about 2 weeks or so ago the one guy was putting a poast up every minut.

and i know some of you may accuse me of having some of these "troll" caracteristics and i wont lie by saying i enjoy a good argument once in a while , but dont forget that every poast i make i at least make an attempt to address the problem/subject of the thread in a humorus but still verry helpful way.

PS has anybody els noteced that all our signature pictures are corrupted?? i think maybe the sever for GF may have a drive with a bad sector or maybe a virrus or somthing....

[Lord of the Rings]

Originally posted by cathodraytube
PS has anybody els noteced that all our signature pictures are corrupted?? i think maybe the sever for GF may have a drive with a bad sector or maybe a virrus or somthing....

You may need to re-load your avatar. The forum software was recently updated. This might have caused some issues.

Yep I reloaded mine & it seems to be fine now.

[Kex]

Well, on the forum I'm on we have a guest section where thats the only place a guest can post, but if they register they can post anywhere except a staff part. We have the guest board so that guest's can ask questions or concerns about the site if they don't know to join up or not, it helps a lot

[Kex]

They could put that in the guest section, like the read before sign up and post any questions or concerns before sign up there maybe?

[ukbobboy01]

Guys,

I totally agree that guest should be kept out of the forum, there have been creeps, perves posting disgusting pictures, flamers and other idiots.

If banning guest brings an end to that sort of nonsense then I'm all for it.



UK Bob

[Only A Hobo]

Hmmm I only came across one and he was a registered user yesterday .. hopefully banned now

Come on Bob give them just a little corner ... Like the smoking area I saw at an airport the other day ... like a quarantine area

[ukbobboy01]

Ahh Hobo

A small corner for guests, maybe a good idea as long as they behave themselves.

You know as well as I do that guests asking for help in a sensible manner will get that help. Both you and I have bent over backwards to not only provide help but also explain things in a non-technical manner. Some of which has been appreciated and others where we get no feed back, I put that down to lack of common courtesy. We have also had arrogant guests that somehow believe we owe them our time and effort.

Becoming members may not put an end to all this but it would certainly cut down on the nonsense we sometime have to put up with.



UK Bob

PS. Gosh, I do sound angry, maybe even a touch arrogant, I must be loosing my marbles. I'm going on a "marble" hunt to recapture some of my lost brain cells. Later.

[stief]

well, I'm outnumbered, but that's OK

I liked the guest posting usually, since I hate sites that require registration. Repeated guests were quickly found they had better feedback when posting as registered users.

Also, in the LW beta forum, experts from other platforms/clients sometimes used guest posting to drop quick and useful notes about how LW was behaving. I imagine they were subscribed to so many sites that the guest posting was a welcome courtesy to them.

As far as trolls are concerned, the usually went away hungry after providing us regulars with some amusement, so the past practise seemed to work pretty well (other than the flood this summer).

A sandbox for guests would be welcome, and/or enough nag screens listing rules and faq's/stickies to discourage repeated use of guestness.

If a guest had to click through 4 or so AGREE screens before getting to the text box, that would be useful to educate legitimate guests before posting, but would be irritating enough to encourage registration.

Cheers