[MikeF]

Nice mod but it's operating in the grey zone and until Google definitively clarifies whether it's OK for a spider to see my forum content while an unlogged-in visitor can not, I will not be installing it.

I don't understand how the point hasn't been clarified by the major search engines. Cloaking is when the spiders see content a person casually going to the site doesn't see for the purposes of gaining ranking. If the default usergroup is Unregistered with ability to read posts restricted, and the bots see much more its cloaking...

The bottom line is that its not OK.

Imagine you are Google or Yahoo trying to get the most relevant search results. The archive is a duplicate content / optimization issue... they may rank you lower or higher for duplicate content depending on duplication but theyre not going to terminate you. Now if you added 100 content relevant keywords at the end of every archive page to gain better rank, they probably would.

The same goes for this - if there are some general discrepencies between what registered/unregistered people see its not a big deal. But turning spiders into forum members... Combine this with the vBPopup mod and someone might as well start cheesyforum.org