[cheat-master30]

1. True, and no one can argue for banning them, as all they do is generally positive.

2. So true. There are scenarios (such as sensitive issues and private forums) where you don't want this, but if you are running a non controversal, normal site, this is something to think about. Never stop guests viewing your forum, and if you don't, also never stop them viewing topics either.

3. Cannot say, but I still know more people on broadband connections than dial up, and the resolution thing is a bit old fashioned.

4. Ditto. You don't know how often I use stats like how many members joined since the forum opened and how long it has been around for to decide when to join. Just one advantage of letting guests view profiles is that you can let them work out how active the forum is from stuff like that. I do wish contact information could be made private but not all of the profile though. Just e-mail and IM information. And yes, the best way to encourage guests is to keep cool features like the arcade to the members only.

5. So true. I do this a lot myself, and on every forum I ever registered to. Failure to do this ends your forum on the same note as that forum with 122 members and only 22 posts... the forum graveyard. And failure to keep involved as an admin leads to either a dead forum or a state of anarchy/civil war. I have seen this happen too often...

6. Agreed.

7. Also agreed. To add to this, partial network banning could also accidentally ban a whole school/workplace/college/library/internet cafe as well, which would ruin access to your forum for those depending on such places.

8. I have no idea about this, because it causes a conflict of theories and ideas in a psychological and philosophical sense.

9. I disagree. True with a small forum, but any large forums do need more than one staff member with this kind of power. Do you really think many of the largest communities online (Offtopic, Gamefaqs, IGN, etc) could be run with one administrator? Some are corporate, but many actually high non paid admins because of need as well.

10. Honestly, I have no idea why a HTML allowed option even exists, because the option unfiltered is website suicide. Makes me think of a certain forum I used to go to which accidentally allowed iframe code and someone inserted shock pictures in topic titles...

11. Also true. I have seen instances of vBulletin 3.0 and 3.5 being run, which is just slightly insecure. I also remember a site once still running vBulletin 2.

12. Sadly this is a very common problem and materialist attitude, as far too many people think that by adding one more thing, doing one more thing or buying one more thing, everything will be perfect and their problems will be over. Far from the case, and why have a clock, it's already on your desktop? And a weather display is useless for non weather related forums. Reminds me of that engineer saying, that 'If something is not broke, it doesn't have enough featurs yet!'