Limit Viewing/Allow Spidering

[dynamite]

I would like to make a request for the the ability to limit Guest to viewing of the thread titles only. When they attempt to view the actual thread, they will receive a message stating that they must register to view posts.
On the flip side, I still want spiders like Google to be able to fully spider the site so I can continue to draw traffic from the search engine.

The reason for this request is because my bandwidth is greatly increased by users who aren't even participating on the site. Most come to view certain information contained in a thread, get that info, never return, and never participate. I figure if they have to take the time to register, verify their email, etc., then they might actually take the time to participate.

Thanks for any help you can give me!

[NTLDR]

You do realise that giving google full access to the threads, and not normal guests will A) still allow guests to view the posts from googles cache and B) it would be potentialy very easy to bypass anyway, depending on how its done.

[dynamite]

Yeah, for the majority this will inconvenience enough to either sign up or go away. I know there are the caches, but I think the majority of people don't pay attention to them, otherwise they wouldn't even be coming to my site, and besides, if they are reading the caches then they might not even come to the site anyways. I figure when I have 20,000+ unique visitor a month and only 3,000 registered users, and a few hundred actually participating, something is out of whack.
I know I could just require viewers to register to see anything, but I think this turns them away even more, and could affect my page ranking on Google which is a 6 right now.

[dynamite]

I think this would be fairly simple to do... guess this means I am going to try myself because it looks like others would like it too: https://vborg.vbsupport.ru/showthread.php?t=60137

Just one thing, can someone point me to as to where it identifies the spiders so I can look at that code. Thanks!

[dynamite]

Quick question... does anyone know if this hack has any impact on spiders (ie. will it only allow them to spider 5 threads and then block them)? If not, I believe this one could be adjusted to fit vB3 and sever the same puropse (that is if it is ok with Zzed to modify it)

[Zachery]

Originally Posted by dynamite

Quick question... does anyone know if this hack has any impact on spiders (ie. will it only allow them to spider 5 threads and then block them)? If not, I believe this one could be adjusted to fit vB3 and sever the same puropse (that is if it is ok with Zzed to modify it)

either LET spiders visit, or DONT

and i belive its done with sessions so search engins wouldnt properly spider it anyway

[dynamite]

Originally Posted by Faranth

either LET spiders visit, or DONT

and i belive its done with sessions so search engins wouldnt properly spider it anyway

Well, the thing is is that I WANT spiders to be able to do their job, I just don't want guests to be able to view anything other than the thread title without registering.

[NTLDR]

I'm pretty sure this is against googles policy and could result in your site being removed from there index IIRC.

[dano]

Cant you get around that with the archive built into vb3? Google and other spiders can still crawl that and you wont have any issues turning off the board to non members.

[NTLDR]

If you hacked the forum to prevent viewing by guests, but allowed it on the archive why bother to register when you could read the thread in the archive?