Hidden Content

[Jaii]

MC-Market's competitor has something similar, where a guest that isn't signed in/confirmed can view threads and replies, however upon viewing the thread/replies it'd replace the words with "Please 'Sign Up' or 'Sign In' to view this content."

I highly suggest adding a system like this, seeing as it'd encourage more people to sign up, rather than guest viewing and adding people from their posts to scam others.

TL;DR
- Add a system where non-logged in users can view all threads, besides the obvious private marketplace BUT, it'd prompt them with a sign-in/sign-up message on every post.
- Hide all links on profiles through this too.

Pro's:
Brings more users.
Adds a bit more life to the statistics.

Con's:
Personally can't see any, other than the fact it's going to either cost Mick money, or the developers time. If that's the case, they're useless.

 

[punctured]

You're saying to make it an option to hide content or for all content to be hidden automatically to guests?

 

[Jaii]

You're saying to make it an option to hide content or for all content to be hidden automatically to guests?

All content is hidden to guests, forcing them to sign up to view hidden content.

 

[Mick]

I'd love to open this up again for more feedback. There are a few ways we could do this:

- Only allow guest users to see the thread's main post and hide replies until they sign up
- Only allow guest users to view x threads (with replies visible) until they're forced to sign up to see more
- Use the other system you were referring to and force all guests to sign up to view any content on the site

I never thought that this was the sort of thing that users would want us to implement, but if it is then I think it'd work well.

 

[Mick]

Oh dear god no, please no! You were smart to not implement this. Don't require a sign in to view content. Awful for SEO. You can kiss your Google search ranking goodbye if this gets approved.

If we allowed users to view 10 threads before they're asked to sign up I don't particularly understand how that would influence the page rankings since it would rely on a user's cookies, but I'm not that knowledgeable about SEO.

 

[Shaun]

Oh dear god no, please no! You were smart to not implement this. Don't require a sign in to view content. Awful for SEO. You can kiss your Google search ranking goodbye if this gets approved.

I'm going to add to this by saying that it's also horrible for user experience - to require a user to take action before viewing the content of the website (whether that be through submitting an email to a list, creating an account, ticking a box to ensure XYZ) is a big no-no when it comes to conversions - convince the user to register by other means of enticement, not by brute force just to access snippets of a post.

I'll also say that SEO impact is questionable, you could very well index all of the content and then, once the DOM has loaded, switch out the text for "Sign up to view this content" with JS.

 

[Mick]

All of these comments about how it could impact SEO and other usability concerns definitely are valid, and I suppose that those issues do outweigh the relatively small boost to our stats that we would receive from forcing users to sign up.

Denied, thanks for the suggestion.