Login to View More - Registration Nagging
 

This add-on hides posts from threads and nags the users to register/login if they are guest and/or have landed on your site from a search engine. A simple way to boost your membership count :)

There are a few options like:
- Choose which forums this will work on
- Guests or only visitors from search engine
- Two styles to choose from (see screenshots)

This add-on requires no file edits and you can edit the visuals easily from template and CSS.

Add-on Sponsor: Diabetes Daily

Screenshots: http://imgur.com/a/gByEc

Change Log:

• v 1.1.0
  • Added option to control how this add-on will treat search engines.
  • Added option to only apply for threads with last post older than X days.
• v 1.0,0
  • Initial release.

This is the second add-on Diabetes Daily has funded for the vBulletin community. Our first was vBSSO for single-signon across a variety of platforms. Thank you very much to all those who have contributed to the addon community - it feels great to be able to share back when we can!

How does this handle search bots?

It goes by referrer. So the search bots should see the same thing that search visitors use. To do it any other way would put you at risk for being delisted from Google. The plugin is probably a tradeoff between search engine ranking (less content on the page, though still one post) and conversion rates. If you value the communication/longterm engagement more than the pageviews, then it may be worthwhile. If not, then it's probably a net negative.

In our first day of testing, our conversion rate is up 5x and our bounce rate is down 5%. We will be monitoring the long-term impact on our search rankings. You could always test it on a subset of forums for a few months and see how it works for you and what impact it has on your search traffic.

Wait, you say they will see the same thin search visitors see, but don't they see the message as well?

Yes, they see the first post and then this message.

Well, then that is not good, the search engines should be able to see anything, that is not in a private forum. If they see that message, I would think your rankings are going to drop, as there is no content for them to view.

You are correct. Instead of seeing 10 posts on the page, they now see one post. (We have many longer posts, so it still meets Google's guidelines of having at least 300 words of unique content per page.)

So there is definitely less content to index, so I would assume we would see a reduction in search traffic. The vast majority of our search traffic comes to our blog, so this is not really an issue for us. I'd rather have 5x less traffic to forums with a 20x increase in conversion rate. Other forum managers would look at that formula and say it doesn't make sense to them. It all depends upon your model.

I wouldn't recommend this for most people unless you have a specific reason. Sites that do or have done something like this are Quora and many media sites using gating like the Wall Street Journal. You could also theoretically only gate older posts behind a login.

As many site don't have blogs or use them then this plugin is not good. I want more coming to my site not less

Cutting off Google to most of your content is definitely not a good idea.

You can control this behavior in the latest version.

That's not true. Not all sites depends on SE indexing every reply-posts. Usually initial post contains enough materials that are related to the topic anyways.

Also, you are forgetting that it is just an option. Plenty of sites has contents that they don't wanna show in public (for whatever reason) without registering. This add-on acts nicely as snippet and drive conversation rates. Sites like Quora/WSJ works in a similar way and still get SE traffic just fine.

I do not agree.

On a site with user generated content, stopping most of that content from being crawled is not good. If you have a long standing thread on a good topic with 700 posts and only 20 of them get crawled you are losing.

Yes I know that forums have tons of worthless content and usually the main post is the most important but still.

And yes I do agree that it will increase conversion rates. I am just not sure if it is worth the loss of indexed content. We could be talking about many, many thousands of pages not being indexed on some sites.

On sites that do not rely heavily on search engine traffic this mod would be great.

I don't see why you are so worked up about this. This add-on has been developed for Diabetes Daily and it is working GREAT. It has been shared on vb.org for free so others can benefit from it if they need it. Simple as that.

I am not worked up. lol We are just discussing this and I disagreed with you. Calm down. Someone can disagree without being worked up or angry.

I am not saying I do not appreciate your work or that this mod does not have a purpose. As I mentioned in my previous post it does. I said this "On sites that do not rely heavily on search engine traffic this mod would be great."

For a site like mine - this is very true.

Installed and rated! Thanks for sharing it.

Don't search engines look down on preferring bots over browsers? I think this is the main point that we're trying to get across here. Showing everything to a bot and then telling a real person that they need to login to see said content is a bit silly, I'd say. To each their own, however, t'is just my opinion.

This add-on will show exactly the same thing to real visitor and SE crawler bot. However, you can choose to allow bot to see all posts if you desire (options available in admincp).

Wouldn't that fall under cloaking though?

Cloaking refers to the practice of presenting different content or URLs to human users and search engines. Cloaking is considered a violation of Google’s Webmaster Guidelines because it provides our users with different results than they expected.

Some examples of cloaking include:

Serving a page of HTML text to search engines, while showing a page of images or Flash to users
Inserting text or keywords into a page only when the User-agent requesting the page is a search engine, not a human visitor

This is more or less what I was trying to say. Thanks, ozzy47.

Well I would just like to know for sure, because I might use this but not if it is going to hurt me for cloaking, which I think it will fall under.

This works perfectly for our forums. Is there a way you can control which sections this system can be applied to?

EDIT
Saw the screenshots where you can select the Forum ID's.. I'll go check this out for sure.. hella-lot easier than custom templates in order to do this.

Double edit:
I put it to 0, but when saving it it switches back to 1. Is this a bug?

Triple Edit:
I can't get this to work I'm afraid. I've installed it, enabled it so it affects guests as well. Switched around with the days, but regardless what I use.. It doesn't appear to be working at all. I can still all posts (as guest). I even enabled it on all forums.. nada, nothing. Sorry.

Using vBulletin 4.4.2

By default, it shows same thing to guests and search engine. So it is not cloaking.
However, you can configure it to be that way if you desire.


The 0/1 issue is a small mistake on my part. Will get it fixed soon. I'm not sure about the last part. If you prefer, I am willing to take a look in to your forums and see what's up.

In my forum style is not correct.
no background in gray, no layout as a screenshot, only simple written.

How can I fix?

Thank for support

Try switching css on filesystem option.

Is there anyway I can use this to target specific usergroups as well? We have specific sections we wish to hide using this system targeting specific usergroups, but doesn't effect them when they are in a specific sub-usergroup.

For example. We wish to use this system for:

1) Guests / Non-logged in users.
2), Registered users

And only in a set ForumID (section).

Now, when the user has a custom usergroup that is on the 'can view entire section' list, it shows the rest of the posts.

May sound like an odd request, but this system is very useful for us.

Will consider for next version.