Certain number of thread views, until guest are forced to sign up
 

sometimes i see many guests, people that jsut come and read... and blah....

i wonder if theres anyone that would make a hack, that would limit a guest of seeing threads after a certain amount. So lets say after 3-5 threadsviewed, they are forced to sign up.

is this possible guys?

Interesting idea. I also see merit in this hack idea. :)

this is a good hack, i planned to do this to do this with a few pages on my site, however with threads you wouldn't really wanna alienate search engines.

gently...gently... bump...

bump

bump :disappointed:

Yea wouldn't it hurt search spiders?

Yes it would ^^

I make people sign up to see anything :) , I gave my search engines new id's so they are no longer a 'guest'

lol so guys, is that possible?

bump

Anything is 'possible'

The trouble with the way you wish to do it, you would have to store ip's now remember anyone on dail up changes ip's so if they can read 10, then tomorrow they can read 10 more.

Plus the database of ip's you would have to log in the end is just not worth it IMO

this actually wouldn't be too difficult, if you wanted to do it in a loose fashion...

1. Guests browse via a unique session, so just allow X page views per guest session... This would be the quickest, fastest, easiest way, however it would mean if they came back later they could browse X more pages. (But I think most would get the hint the first time they encounter the Please Register page).

2. Bots/spiders are tracked and recognized in vB3, so just exclude them from the limitation.


Okay, but now if you didn't want to do the simple session method, then you would need to start tracking via a cookie and/or IP method, which, again isn't all that difficult, but it could build up to a large amount of data depending on how many guests browse your forum. You would need to purge off old data after a certain amount of time.

In the long run, I find that people sign up for my forum simply because of the amount of good information they find, and they would like to ask their own questions and such. Also, I have viewing/downloading attachments disabled for guests, so that is also a little encourgement. ;)

that sounds pretty good, thru the simple mode...

Just add some extra counter field in the session table, and have the function that manages sessions increment the counter for guests. Then when the number is reached, just have it redirect to the registration page with an additional message.

I don't know how bots are handled, you will have to dig around through the code for that.

only problem is i dont know how to code :o :speechless: