Guests/Exclusivity

[mish]

Observation- Noticed there can be 30 members on line participating in the forum sharing/exchanging recipes, and all this forum has to offer, and about 700 guests. I realize the idea is to hopefully have more new members participating /contributing/sharing in our forum. Would love to see all the 'guests' join us and participate.

Having been a member for quite some time, I know how hard admin, site helpers and members help and contribute to the site. Think we have achieved an excellent status on the web as a cooking forum, and we are so much more than a cooking forum.

Not to discourage or exclude any potential newcomers, but a thought is moving toward more exclusivity. i.e. perhaps require that guests sign up as a member and join the forum. There is much to offer here, and great comraderie among the members. Hoping guests will join in.

Example: To join any MSN group and be approved, one needs to fill out an application, apply for a passport, and sumbit a reason/short description as to why one would like to join the group. Managers then review it, and get back via email if you are accepted, and request to sign an agreement form, in complying with th rules of the forum.

Again, this is not intended to make work for site helpers/admin...I think we have achieved the status of being the best cooking site on the web. Would like to see the 700 guests join our group.

[Jikoni]

mish, I agree-ish based on the reason I joined, I lurked around in the background for sometime, and then just got 'sold' and had to join. That's the beauty of DC for me anyway.On the other hand I would love to see all the 700 join.

[ronjohn55]

I'm all for as many people joining and contributing as possible, but I believe that at any given time, a good chunk of those "visitors" may actually be from search engines looking for search keywords, not actual people checking out the site.

John

[GB]

John is absolutley correct. Most of those 700 are not actually real live people, just bots.

[mish]

What's a bot? TIA So... they're not actually "guests?"? Interesting - because I think we should start charging the 700 lurkers? a membership fee, lol. I think you get my drift. There are restricted sites, requiring sign-up to even view/enter some cooking sites. Just tryng to understand. Would like to see a membership of 1000's.

[GB]

They are (to the best of my understanding) programs that search engines like Google and Yahoo use to go out and seach for keywords. That is how we get listed on those search engines.

[mish]

oooooooooh. Okay. Everybody, in all your posts, in tiny letters, type Discuss Cooking...lol and everyone will be googled here.

[Michael in FtW]

Yep - we got the bots searching us - which account for some of the visitors.

We also have people searching for a recipe or topic using one of the search engines like Google, Yahoo, etc. that ran into a match which led them here and they are taking a look at us.

The reason the Thread Titles sometimes get changed is so that the bots will pick up on the beginning of a thread and not just one subsequent message that might hit on the right key word.

And, some of you thought your Mods were just being mean and picking on you.

[Michael in FtW]

Quote:

Originally Posted by mish whatsa bots?

In the most basic terms - referring to the bots from search engines - they are programs that run around the web looking for content/key words and add anything they find to the search engine's database. When you go to a search engine to search for something - what is displayed is what their bots found.

That is why a moderator will sometimes change the initial thread title to something else - to make it more accessable to a wider audience when searched with a search engine.

[MJ]

A bot (spider,robot or crawler) is a program that visits Web sites and reads their pages and other information in order to create entries for a search engine index. They also bring people to the site.

We have recently added a modification to the site that encourages "lurkers" to sign up. When they do sign up, a welcome PM is sent that encourages them to hop in and join us on the board, and it seems to be working great.
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