Limited Guest Viewing -- Improve community registration rates
 

Note: This addon works with the 3.6.x series only. Click Here for the 3.7.0 version of this addon.

With vBulletin, forum guests are able to view endless amounts of content without being directly asked or forced to register no matter how many times they come back. The purpose of the Limited Guest Viewing System is to drive in registrations by limiting the number of threads guests are able to view without interruption.

This plugin offers two options which can be used to drive in more registrations. The first option allows you to show a reminder message or advertisement after a guest has viewed a certain number of threads. The second option puts up a roadblock stopping guests from viewing threads altogether after reaching a certain number of views. Both options work together to encourage and ultimately force anonymous visitors to either register or login but can also be used separately based on your individual needs.

Because this plugin uses cookies, few if any bots will be impacted when it comes to spidering your site.

Modifications/ Instructions:
Template edits: 1
Plugins: 1 (adds 1 template and several settings)

This template hack should take under 5 minutes to implement and customize.

Customizing the content / messages
To customize which messages appear or what they say, go to vBulletin options, select the ?Limited Guest Viewing System? group and configure the options as desired. Each phase can be modified by adding translation text.

Through the ACP you can enable or disable each option, specify the number of threads that can be viewed before the option is enabled and input any forums you wish to exclude from being blocked.

About spiders/bots
This plugin works by setting a cookie to track the number of visits from a particular user. As bots do not tend to accept cookies, they should not be blocked. To further insure there is no spider accessibility issues, there script identifies major bots (google, yahoo, msn, aol) and explicitly lets them through -- you can easily add to this list by editing the plugin code should you so desire, however, unless a bot starts taking cookies this should not be necessary.


Welcome headers compatibility
The Limited Guest Viewing is designed to work with the Welcome Headers system without any conflict. To insure that welcome header messages do not show up at the same time as the limited guest viewing message, please be sure you are running welcome headers version 4.1.3 or greater (released 11/19).

Updates
5/9/2008 - Released update to prevent installs on 3.7 boards.
2/18/2007 - Minor update to fix register link. Updates optional.
11/20/2006 - Minor update released to fix error with links in some messaging. Updates recommended.

Thanks I'll check it out!

1-Does this realy checks these spiders. If it doesnt limit the spider then i am going to install this lovely mod
2-Doesnt this conflict with the welcome header mod?

It checks for the bots I've listed (google, aol, msn, yahoo). Any other bot will be blocked unless you add it to the plugin manually.

No, they both work together. I will be releasing an update of the welcome headers in a few minutes to insure they never appear at the same time.

What if your you usergroup options are set to block everything from guests view... Set to private..

Awesome hack! Thank you. ;)

YES! I've been waiting for something like this forever.


Definetly checking it out tonight.


Few questions: How does it detect how many page views? Cookie or IP based or both :D

How easily is it circumventable? If i simply clear my cookies, will i be able to start viewing all over again?


I'd like to open a registration required area up on my site for a short while but limit it in this way to require a registration to get all the goods!

Then this wouldn't do anything for you.

Just cookies. Tracking IPs would mean a lot of database calls which I wanted to avoid.

Getting around this would not be impossible or even very difficult but it should stop most guests who don't know a thing about tracking visits in cookies.

installed and tested, awesome hack, its not all or nothing anymore. and if people wanna deleate their cookies just to get another 5 views out of my site, im sure they will just register, that would be less hassle imo.

I have a fear if Google realised your page was using this it could really damage your ranking.

Wow Ted. Great hack!

Excellent. :).

Attention :

s. Screenshot - this is happening after Installation of this Hack.

Most Yahoo IP´s are blocked.

That's certainly possible. However, many sites (i.e. webmaser world, new york times, barons, wsj, etc...) do just this... and do it with Google's knowledge. In fact, Google has a product that logs in to protected sites and from what I've been told, will be rolling this out to more sites in the future.

Keep in mind that you are not showing different content to a user any more than Amazon shows people who have logged in different content than those that have not. Most dynamic sites these days show different content to different groups -- the welcome message on your forumhome template, showing birthdays or announcements to one group, or ads to another. In this case, all you are doing is limiting the number of times a guest may view pages. I can't tell you what this will or won't do for the SERPs, I can tell you why it makes sense and what others are doing that's similar.

It looks like Yahoo's agent was a little different than what my filter had. Try updating the plugin file and let me know if you see any issues.

Sorry, Ted after your other Answer about Google i have to uninstall this. If Google uses Login Agents it will only do it at Major Sites and that are not the most Sites. ;)

Nice Idea - but Crawling is more important for me than force Guest to register. ;)

awesome mod ted s.......works perfectly

Ted, quick question on bot's?

If you want certian bot's to come to your site, say Yahoo! Slurp Spider or FeedFetcher-Google Spiders.........where do you add these? I see Would it be something like

K, i have to disable this for now.......redlabour is right, it is kickin off the bot's for those that need to have them on.

I will keep checking back on this post tho, this is a great idea.

Well, this is what i have so far: It seems once you install this, that it write's to phpmyadmin, so you have to continue forward with it....Uninstalling it didn't change the bot's being denied access......

I also installed the Member Bots 1.0 per the instruction's......

I will let ya'll know how this works out....

Couldnt a user/guest just delete their cookie and start it all over again? Considering firefox has a quick thing to delete cookies.

This plugin does not modify any data in your database so when you remove it, it is removed. If the bots were denied access when you removed this, there's another reason... and this plugin isn't it.

Yes. The goal here isn't to make it impossible to view threads, it's to make it harder and thus encourage registration. If you're looking to shut guests out, stick to the registration system.

Just change the line google|msnbot|zoints|aol|yahoo|slurp to include any other bots you like with a pipe (|) between each name.

so this hack still allows all search engine bots to view?

But limits normal guests?

thanks

How about adding a timer to where the cookie expires after x amount of hours :D


And then in the phrase maybe something like

"Thank you for viewing our content, you've viewed all the content allowed by guests, you can view more unrestricted content in X amount of hours blah blah...:"

Good hack.

I've installed, and only problem is with the 'custom message' edit. It comes up with a SQL database error...

Any ideas?

Thanks,
Scott

Try to reimport the product XML and overwrite the old one.

i think this would be a great idea, but just have it that the guest can return to the board after 24hours say and then view a thead again, and if they click another thread then they get the msg.
But just have the existing msgs, not the X hours left, becuse then they might just not bother registering or they may come back to view latter without thinking to reg.

Maybe this can all be set in the admincp for this. So it can be cusomised to suite your own forum.

Just some ideas though,

So far its a great hack though, thanks heaps :) working great on my board

So, I have tested this a bit, and it seems really useful. What exactly is the problem from the spider perspective? Is it blocking them or is it not? Also, wouldn't using only the message bypass any problems with the cookies anyway?

Thanks!! I love your hacks

Ahhh this is a good point!! Does it block spiders!!

No it does not - read the Thread. It only works at the most important but not at all. And sometimes it can block the important Ones if they change their Crawlers.


Is anybody reading before installing ? *omg*

Thanks for your help.

I've reimported, and still the same problem :(

Bots dont work then.... great shame

*uninstalls* :(

This hack is great but it looks like everyone overlooked this simple mistake:

On the "Register block page" the create a new account links are invalid and thus a guest is unable to sign up for an account through that page. Other than that, great hack.:D

Its a great hack I was in need of,
thanks

i like this very much and by far a good hack..thanks **INSTALLED**

Marvelous hack, thanX :)

It let's the bot's on your site........After 12am when my site stat's reset, here is what i show currently for my bot's: Yahoo! Slurp(11) , WorldIndexer , Google and Yahoo! Slurp Spiders (283), Majestics MJ12bot Spiders (1), Technorati Spiders (1), WiseNut Spiders (1), MSNBot Spiders (1), WorldIndexer Spiders (2), FeedBurner Spiders (2), Voyager Spiders (1), Google Spiders (1), FeedFetcher-Google Spiders (1)........

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