Inliners International Forums General Discussion Bench racing Someone is playing with the website

Noticed changes to the actively seen subjects when not signed in. Don't know if this is a accident or on purpose.

When I'm not signed in I don't see the same things as when I am. It's been that way for a long time for me. I gave up on staying logged in years ago. Sometimes it just loges me out, no big deal.

Logs me out every 4 or 5 days. When logged out, I cannot access "Bench Racing" and a few other differences.

Not an accident. Believe it or not the majority of the traffic on this site - 80% - is from unregistered guests - including Google spiders crawling and indexing our content.

I had a discussion with leadership regarding the Forum configuration. Didn't make sense to me that most forums were open to unregistered guests - while a few were restricted to registered users: Bench Racing, Truck Talk, Tech Tips and Body & Paint. Those are now open for guests to view.

There is one Forum that has been changed in the opposite direction. Unregistered guests can no longer view Chapter News. Seems reasonable to expect folks to at least provide a valid email address before being allowed to read postings on Club activities.

best regards,
stock49

I noticed awhile ago that the forums I saw when not signed in had changed. It used to be that I only saw six or so forums when not signed in. The website signs me out every four or five days. Tonight when I went on, only the Chapter News was unavailable before I signed in.

Somebody is doing something behind the scenes. Can't tell what it is or if it will be beneficial???

Many forums and even Facebook don't let you see any content until you log in to your account. If you give people the milk for free, they have no incentive to buy the cow. I told Rich several years ago he should hide more of the forums content to encourage more people to create accounts and log into the forum. Once they see what they were missing, they wonder what else is waiting for them within the club. That is the first step to getting them to be active participants and then on to club membership.

Also, I knew the former owner and developer of the UBBThreads forum software when I purchased my forum package 8 years ago. And he told me that the UBBThreads software wasn't intended for people to sign in and stay logged in indefinitely because if too many users do it, it can cause problems within the software because it makes the software seem active and working behind the scenes unnecessarily. Its like leaving your car running when you go to bed, its totally unnecessary, and can cause problems with your car just like it can with the software if you keep doing it. So it has a default hard wired into it to bump you off after so long. This issue became noticed by some of you several years ago after the software update took place, and many thought it was a glitch or a problem. But it really is the normal function of the software to do that and is intentionally designed to safeguard against issues that staying logged in can and will cause if you do it.