Granting permissions to GoogleBot
 

I have a question for you vBulletin Guru's out there. My partner and I own the site Zuney.net.

We have recently changed the viewing permission for the forum so that only registered members can view it, however we have a slight issue. Although we would like our viewers to register before their can use our forums, we would like the Google Spider to be able to crawl around our forums without any restrictions. Is there any way to go abouts this.

In theory there would simply be an option that would allow me to grant the Google Spider permissions so it can act as a registered member, and therefore view the forums, enhancing our hits and members, however I don't beleive / cannot find this option in the admin panel.

That would be considered cloaking, and will get you blacklisted by many search engines.

Search engines should only see what guests can see.

don't some subscription based news sites do that already? because I remember reading somewhere, that by changing user agent to google you could access these sites?
then again I may have read it wrong :)

There's a hack for 3.5.4 -- possibly for 3.6.0 as well, that does this.

And its called?

see: https://vborg.vbsupport.ru/showthread.php?t=108070