[Detomah]

Just my little view regarding users just using the arcade section of forums and nothing else.

I know for some it may be a problem when all your bandwidth is being gobled up by people who don't use your forum for anything else, but surely having more bodies on your forum in the first places is going to encourage more users, which in turn will gradually get you more people posting anyway. Nobody likes to see a forum with no users on it.

The way I look at it is, that at least they are on my website, no matter what they are doing, at least I have them, when they could quite easily be somewhere else (there's enough choices out there). My CPM banners take care of the cost of bandwidth with them, so I don't see it as a problem. If someone doesn't want to write posts in the first place, forcing them to do so in order for them to get to the only thing they want, is only going to get more useless spam posts on the forum in my opinion just so they can reach the required amout. At the end of the day, the arcade is only going to hold so much interest for any user, after that they are more than likely going to explore a website they've been using for a while anyway, but if you've restricted them, the chances are they may just leave and never come back, because they are likely to think there will be more restrictions like that and that it's not worth it.

Anyway, just my view on it, which may not even be valid for certain other website set ups.