Getting people to register on a forum is not obvious, especially then they are only searching for information and not really willing to join the discussions.
I guess this is true for all forum, but it is especially true for forum which propose mostly informative contents, rather than more "discussion-type" threads. On my forum dedicated to "Japan - travel off the beaten tracks" ( http://www.secret-japan.com/forum ), I see often 150 visitors per day, but most of them just take the information they need and just leave.
I would like to discuss here the possibilities to have incentives to make them register.
Of course, the easiest is just to give only access to the discussions to registered users, but this will cause bots not to index the posts, and probably is a very bad strategy on the long term...
We can display a message on the portal for non-registered person, but this seems not so effective.
I would like to know if there is a possibility to have some of the following features available ONLY for registered members:
- Pictures in the posts are hidden for visitors, with a picture or text saying "please register to see this picture" instead;
- Some options, like printing the messages, are available only to registered users;
- An "alarm" message is displayed on the top of the page suggesting visitors to register...
Any other suggestion would be interested. How do you do to have people register on your site? Please discuss that here...
sanji