Does forcing registration on a forum kill it or increase interaction?
 

so basically, there's a good deal of interaction, but looking at the member to guest ratio, there are a lot of people just browing. In anyone's experience does forcing registration due to a lot of guests intercrease the number of joins or kill the forum at the point i'm at?

niche is the forum is a self/relationship picture post site.

thanks for the info...:) :) :)

what???????

What the fuck are you on about you stupid fucking clown.

I think it's better, if most people are interested in the forum they will register which gets them more invested.

I would say with a forum like yours you are allways going to get far more lurkers than posters and unless your forum is a famous one of it's kind then I would say not to go the forced registration route but instead concentrate on trying to moneterize the % of your audience that's just lurking. Think in terms of your site being as being a "hub" and try to direct the traffic to where it will do you most good.

I would say only force registration for posting. Some damn sites will lock you out from even reading anything until you register. Don't make that mistake. The lurker is your friend.

Yeah, make lurking possible...but when they wan't to post: registration!

Good luck!

From the SEO perspective, search engines won't be able to spider your forums so you'll lose traffic that way. From a personal point of view, I usually don't register for private forums unless I know what is being discussed.

The "Guest" traffic is still traffic that you can take advantage of... for increasing interaction and memberships, there are other things you can do like contests, virtual stores, etc.

forced registration tells the surfer you want an email address to spam the fuck out of
they are wise to that

forced registration = bad.

Compromise. Open for everyone to read, then require registration to view pics.