Show Thread Enhancements - Login to View More - Registration Nagging

This add-on hides posts from threads and nags the users to register/login if they are guest and/or have landed on your site from a search engine. A simple way to boost your membership count

There are a few options like:
- Choose which forums this will work on
- Guests or only visitors from search engine
- Two styles to choose from (see screenshots)

This add-on requires no file edits and you can edit the visuals easily from template and CSS.

Add-on Sponsor: Diabetes Daily

Screenshots: http://imgur.com/a/gByEc

Change Log:

• v 1.1.0
  • Added option to control how this add-on will treat search engines.
  • Added option to only apply for threads with last post older than X days.
• v 1.0,0
  • Initial release.

[davide101]

This is the second add-on Diabetes Daily has funded for the vBulletin community. Our first was vBSSO for single-signon across a variety of platforms. Thank you very much to all those who have contributed to the addon community - it feels great to be able to share back when we can!

[RichieBoy67]

How does this handle search bots?

[davide101]

It goes by referrer. So the search bots should see the same thing that search visitors use. To do it any other way would put you at risk for being delisted from Google. The plugin is probably a tradeoff between search engine ranking (less content on the page, though still one post) and conversion rates. If you value the communication/longterm engagement more than the pageviews, then it may be worthwhile. If not, then it's probably a net negative.

In our first day of testing, our conversion rate is up 5x and our bounce rate is down 5%. We will be monitoring the long-term impact on our search rankings. You could always test it on a subset of forums for a few months and see how it works for you and what impact it has on your search traffic.

[ozzy47]

Wait, you say they will see the same thin search visitors see, but don't they see the message as well?

[davide101]

Yes, they see the first post and then this message.

[ozzy47]

Well, then that is not good, the search engines should be able to see anything, that is not in a private forum. If they see that message, I would think your rankings are going to drop, as there is no content for them to view.

[davide101]

You are correct. Instead of seeing 10 posts on the page, they now see one post. (We have many longer posts, so it still meets Google's guidelines of having at least 300 words of unique content per page.)

So there is definitely less content to index, so I would assume we would see a reduction in search traffic. The vast majority of our search traffic comes to our blog, so this is not really an issue for us. I'd rather have 5x less traffic to forums with a 20x increase in conversion rate. Other forum managers would look at that formula and say it doesn't make sense to them. It all depends upon your model.

I wouldn't recommend this for most people unless you have a specific reason. Sites that do or have done something like this are Quora and many media sites using gating like the Wall Street Journal. You could also theoretically only gate older posts behind a login.

[ForceHSS]

As many site don't have blogs or use them then this plugin is not good. I want more coming to my site not less

[RichieBoy67]

Cutting off Google to most of your content is definitely not a good idea.