Forum Non-Members will Experience a Reduction in Site Visibility

OK...You made me look / flinch .... This is what is saw (BTW long time member)

 

Perhaps a one time per IP address, temporary guest pass can be issued. Lurkers are granted one week to see into our beautiful world and if they do not sign up before the week is up, the IP address from which they are viewing is blocked unless they sign-up immediately upon their return. Oh, that's nasty mean, huh?

 

Take a moment and sign out. Then go to say, Ride Reports. You can see all the posts, you just can’t open the content.
Here is the deal... This Site has been online for just about 8 years (Can you believe it?!?!) and we have around 1400 claimed membership. Meaning one of probably two things.

1) We are only utopic to the hooligans who have chose to stick around, or...
2) Non members have no reason to sign up.
I am going to stop using the word “Lurker” to describe non members however, because as some pointed out, it does not accurately pinpoint the fact or goal. I even corrected the title of this post.

We are not like other MTB sites I suspect. I stopped going to other sites. I'm confident that we have pushed many away for several reasons.
1) We have a no Troll or Nazi policy that we enforce heavily. Not much of a grace period to someone who becomes an azz.
2) We push away eBikers
3) We have a no politics, no religion policy.
4) Our Classifieds are made available only after a person has posted 10 times. That drastically reduces people who want to sell bike stuff on our site.

So I imagine that turns many away...

Mountain Biking Lurkers are welcome, to hang out and not say a word all day every day.

Mountain Bikers who are non members are welcome to stop by any time, but I just prefer them to be members. Why? Because I want to know what our real viewership is.

If you go to the Forum homepage you can see how many members and guests are on. As well you can see how many robots are surfing for SEO as well.

Members who don’t want their presence known can go into stealth mode and many here do.

As a Forum owner, I want to know what the true readership is. No personal info is asked for, so no personal info is given out. No harm no foul.

If the Site is free and all I ask is use Adsense and Amazon when it makes sense, then I’m satisfied the roughly $1300 bucks I spend a year can be justified in my mind.

 

Do you go through the member list periodically and close accounts that have been non-active for a long period of time? Might that give you a ballpark idea of actual membership size?

 

Nope, and I'll tell you the truth.
People deciding if they want to join a Forum often look at how many members there are already. If there are not many, they often do not join. So am I using the inflated number to hopefully draw membership potential? Yeah, kinda.
Forum owners know that the Pareto Factor applies to Forums just as much as to anything else in this world. Of 100% of the people counted, 20% are the active, and 80% are either just spectators or non participant.
I would very much like to take my roughly $1300 bucks and invest it in my bikes, and my family. But I made a commitment to our imtbtrails community to keep the site open. The more members there are the more chance I can stop investing financially into the Site.
So there are three factors really, Financial, Search Engine Optimization, and measuring true membership.

Edit: As well, I have seen members that have not logged on since 2013 all of a sudden rekindle their mountain bike enthusiasm so I hate to kill an account when they may just be dormant.

 

Donate, people, donate. Support the cause.

 

STR Member since 2012 here...

 

I checked it out in STR. They are pages and pages of this stuff. LOL.

And the few posts i saw are from some from here asking each other why they're on STR. Haha

 

What if non-members get random pop up photos from the Male Hotties thread until they register? Exhibit A:

 

We want them to "WANT" to stay... Not run away!

 

This exactly. Except revise the thread title:
Forum Members not Logged In and Non-Members will Experience a Reduction in Site Visibility

I get it, logging in isn't an unreasonable request to get all the content. Reality may be, users like furball and I won't do it, won't see the content, and will be less compelled to visit at all. Same with non members. IMO the site doesn't have enough relevant/fresh content to restrict some of it.

 

This site isn't a for profit site like most, so it isn't the same as what you would see with a paid staff and redbull backing. Its a local site.

I dont belong to those other sites, they're just too big to be relevant except for product news. I learned the other day ( someone mentioned it on here) that they have chat forums. Didn't know that, and what a cluster it was! I fled from there quick. But did not sign up.

Just like someone mentioned once when STR took a Sh!t that everyone was on Facebook. I checked and there was not anything there that I could find. But of course, Facebook wants to know about your whole life. So it's of no value.

Carry on now.

 

This is because some prolific contributors to this shindig have gone on sabbatical.

Unfortunately for select Hooligans, I persist without having been banned (yet).

Exhibit B:


Log In or Register, or else you will continue to receive these pop-ups!

 

STR 2008.
Heya and of course geoladders way back 2005

I like here ...suck up

 

2400 posts since December 5 and 0 likes. If I weren't banned, I'd like a few of the posts.

They are really on top of things over there.

 

Never even heard of that member but how could anyone miss it with that many posts?!

 

One of the posters is selling psychoactive plants

 

At quick glance I panicked since they switched to the same software as imtbtrails and thought that was data from here...

...Anyone from a place named Dong...

 

As the Ship Slooooooowly sinks into the East....

 

But the guy that bought it a few years ago was going to turn it around and reestablish it to it's prior glory.

 

Yeah yeah yeah...
That's the difference between a mountain bike forum owner, and a Mountain Biker who owns a Forum...

 

A couple years after I'd moved to LA, I was working as a runner in a recording studio, trying to work my way up through the ranks. It was taking longer than I expected, and I was getting jaded. One particular night, when I was nearing the end of my rope, I got sent out on a run by the singer of a prominent rock band at the time to buy Tucks hemorrhoid pad. It was midnight, and I went to the Rite Aid in North Hollywood. The cashier's name tag had the name Dong sloppily written in sharpie. I was about to make a disclaimer about how the Tucks were not for me, but seeing that his name was Dong I felt less compelled to explain myself. It's a moment I'll never forget, and gave me some perspective. I may have been 23, making minimum wage, purchasing someone else's hemorrhoid pads at midnight, but at least I wasn't Dong from Rite Aid with a makeshift name tag. Things turned around shortly after that.

 

Bahahaha!

Ya see @mike..? iMTBtrails GOLD right here!

Our in-house technical editor's last name is Dong. I have yet to hear a joke or even a mere snicker about it, but he did tease me one time for catching a typo in my report....I wrote "Pubic Hearing" instead of "Public Hearing." I would expect nothing less from Mr. Dong.

 

This him?

 

When in doubt..

 

I have a Ping Dong on my route. Maybe it's him?

 

Sitting in a meeting long ago with a recently married psychologist. Her last name was Wiener, and she married a Long. Being the progressive sort, and fairly innocent, she hyphenated her last name to "Long-Wiener".

 

She must have been published under Wiener prior to getting married.

 

I had to think about this, as I always value the deep insight you bring.
I would like to think we have eight years of some pretty good material that has to be worth making up a screen name, answering a dumb Catcha question, and simply logging in.
You have been an awesome supporter of the Site. Through and through!

I got a great email from someone who had recently signed up. Said he should have done it a long time ago and that he was now hoping to get out and get some dirt with us. I found it very encouraging and what this Site was supposed to be about from the very get-go!