Closing the forum to guests?

We are fast approaching 800 members, so I think it may time to revisit this issue. It will always be impossible to eliminate plagarism, but a certain issue is bothering me.

Fly-Addict's "Chappy" is TPO's "Pathfinder"

Chappy has been lifting content directly from TPO, rewording it, and posting it over there. If you read his posts you will immediately see it. I know we don't have this stuff copyrighted, but he should at least cite his sources and say thank you. Chappy is the de facto "Euro expert" on Fly-Addict. Everything he knows, he learned from here.

Please make an assessment and think about it. God only knows how many folks are taking are content and reworking it into articles.

Thanks for your consideration.

Alain,

I hear you. Couple issues:

1. How does closing the forum to guests stop them from registering and then lifting info anyway?

I guess we could ban them and their IP address, but are we really going to be able to find every piece of info that has been lifted from here and then ban them all from the forum? To me it feels like fighting the tide.

2. How much traffic will we lose?

When marketing to advertisers, which I would like to do eventually, they don't care if the traffic is registered. They care how many people visit each day, how long they stay on, how many pages they visit, and other metrics. Something tells me if we don't allow guests to view, we will lose ground on traffic, time on site, amount of pages visted, and other important marketing metrics.

Maybe we do a trial period of a week and see how it affects our traffic levels?

Feel free to chime in, I'm all for a dialog on this.

Also on that. I would suggest, when we see stuff that is copied from our site, that we post a link on that site to the page on our site it has been copied from with a line under it stating:

"at least give credit, where credit is due"

Something tells me that humiliation might spurn a more ethical spread of info.

Aaron and I made some gentle, indirect citations to TPO from Fly-Addict.

If people are at least registered, it does give you some idea who they are, however vague.

I would not close the forum to guests during an active sign-up period like we are in now. I know that in sports, the months of February and August are the slowest times. Perhaps we should consider an experiment in August.

On a typical night, I always see many guests browsing, but only a few members on-line. I have to believe that many of the guests would sign-up, especially given fair warning.

If there is an easy way for you to track the statistics, I would do a one-week trial period in mid-August and see what happens. One measure of the site's success is the number of posts we get. Since guests cannot post, their involvement with the site may not be treated the same to advertisers. I believe that advertisers are most interested in your list of email contacts, and we can only get that from sign ups.

Thanks for considering my opinions, just something to think about. Will not ever solve the plagarism problem, but might help a little.

I hate sites that make you register to view their content.

I usually leave and don't return.

I know FA has decided to make you register or login to view some content; since doing that I have been back ther very infrequently.

I like to pop in from work now and then without logging in.

Great points from both sides. I monitor the traffic with google analytics which has now become the industry standard for measuring web metrics. Most marketing people from companies will want to know the metrics i mentioned before and although email addresses are valuable as they can be sold to companies as a list, I would never stoop that low. Sage sold my info to the fly shop in California and now I won't patronize either. I didn't agree to give my info out to the world so why should they be passing it around?

As for static banner ads, according to my good friend who works for an ad agency doing web banner design and tracking, the most powerful metrics are as follows:
Individual unique visitors
Average time on site per visit
average page views per visit
Bounce rate

And a few others.

When I showed him ours, he was blown away. The average time on site per visit is over 8 min, the average page views per visit are close to 9 and we have between 250 and 300 unique viewers per day.

He suggested I start looking for advertising as soon as I can put together a marketing prospectus.

I will try the experiment in August, but again, the whole purpose of the site is sharing info with anyone in the world who wants to learn. After we have handed them a gift, how can we police what they do with it. Its kind of like the kung fu master who teaches his pupil to fight and then the pupil uses the knowledge to do harm or win fame without giving credit or thinking about their use of that gift they were given. Not much the master can do except have faith that more people use his gifts for good then bad and find comfort in that fact.

As for Eddie's point, I agree and that is what has led me to allow guest browsing. I often get super annoyed by sites that make me fill out a ton of bullshit just to read, and it often deters me from return trips unless I really need something in particular from the site.

However, I have been curious how it would impact our traffic, so I will try it out for a week or two in August as suggested.
Thanks to all for caring enough to think about the betterment of tpo.

Cheers!

The other problem is that when we close the site down to non-registered guests is that the search engines can't see any of the content and we won't attract any new people. Of course a few people will register right away. However, after the initial slight surge the traffic will slow up considerably. I know that idiot is posting all the stuff over there and like Justin said, the best way to deal with that is to embarass him. A simple post like, hey, I saw that on TPO last month. I know that you are a member over there so why not at least give them the credit that they deserve for showing/teaching you that...

Even closing the site to guests is not going to stop losers like that. Besides I am used and desensitized to most of the bullshit that revolves around fly fishing.

[quote author=JUICE link=topic=3181.msg23754#msg23754 date=1244078068]Its kind of like the kung fu master who teaches his pupil to fight and then the pupil uses the knowledge to do harm or win fame without giving credit or thinking about their use of that gift they were given. [/quote]

While we're discussing Kung fu, did you notice the story about Grasshopper?

It appears that Carradine committed suicide in Thailand.

Guys, I would keep it the way it is. People will steal content no matter what & the site is doing quite well as is. I think once the membership reaches 1,000-2,000 the growth will snowball.

Maybe to increase the chances of people signing up, there should be a free section that only members can view, sorta like being a RockStar, but for free. And make it so non-members could get a hint at some great content in there by looking at the topic titles, but not be able to view it until they join for free.

As an enticement to join the site, is there a way you can give people a free one month RockStar access that won't renew unless they pay for it? Maybe we should also start a limited access section called "Insider Information", where we give people some currently hot fishing locations & hatches (not specific pools but rather rivers that are fishing great NOW), or maybe the hot flies, or maybe some "secret" rigging tips, etc.

Why even have guides them? Let's just spoonfeed them some more? Nothing more is going to be given away for free. Should we just walk them to the river? People have to either pay or figure out some things for themselves.