Make Diaries Shown only to Members?

[Elscire]

i for one do not like Lurkers in my Diary, plus its a good place for spiders to gather in other than the puberty forum.
In a forum that i own currently, this had saved me a lot of troubles so why not do the same? it makes me sad to delete a thread to create a new one because yahoo will not bug off

[Whisper]

agreed

I do NOT want the diarys moved to a seperate page though
just hidden from guests

personally I think we should look at making any image posted visable to members only that way guests cant rummage through the photo album n stuff either

[JunkBondTrader]

Didn't we try something similar a couple of years ago?

[Whisper]

not that I remember...
I know they wanted to put diarys onto a seperate page (like govteen) and i hated that idea

but hidden...i dont think we've tried it before
I could be wrong..

either way that was a few yrs ago
i like the idea

[redcar]

Ok I don't really understand what the problem with "lurkers" is. Doesn't it show that your diary is an interesting one? Also why would you have to delete a thread just because of Yahoo Spiders?

[schrei jess]

Yeah really Carmen, you're always complaining about the guests you get in your diary, but why is that SUCH a bad thing? It means people like your diary. I think you're jsut bitter because all the guests are looking at the yaoi board, that's why you deleted the one we had before =P

[Elscire]

Even so wasn't vt's whole purpose was to show the puberty forums and mental illnesses to the guests and not diaries because they have no connection to whatever they were searching for?


but either way about not displaying images to guests works fine too in case if i ever put up a picture of myself and i don't want other strangers(lurkers) to see me




Yeah really Carmen, you're always complaining about the guests you get in your diary, but why is that SUCH a bad thing? It means people like your diary. I think you're jsut bitter because all the guests are looking at the yaoi board, that's why you deleted the one we had before =P
there was a Google bot and a Yahoo Spider!

[redcar]

Even so wasn't vt's whole purpose was to show the puberty forums and mental illnesses to the guests and not diaries because they have no connection to whatever they were searching for?

I don't remember anything like that, but as always I am open to correction.

Personally I don't see any reason why Diaries should be hidden to Guests. I really don't see what there is to gain by this, I only see people loosing out. Guests may want to look around and just get information and not want to join. Like there is the Gay Bar which provides lots of information on teen sexuality. I really don't see what there is to gain.

[Elscire]

if that cannot be done is it possible to make pictures not show then?

[Aηdy]

I agree that not showing pictures to guests will be a good idea... however I'm 50/50 on the idea of hiding diarys to geusts.

[Bobby]

Diaries might draw people to the site also, I would go with blocking guests from viewing images.

[DouggyO.o]

i think diary's should bee hidden to guests, carmens diary is full of lurkers due to the yuri and yaoi threads. it attracts a lot of unwanted people..specifically people in their 30's that like lolicon or hentai kinda stuff

[redcar]

About blocking Guests from seeing images, I'm not sure if that can be done. We will need the opinion of our uber sexy Kiros for that one!:P

But on the diaries one, I dont think lurkers are a problem there. We have puberty forums where teens are talking about a lot of stuff. I don't think our lurkers and unwanted characters would be so interested in the diaries.

[Elscire]

blocking images for guests is possible from my forums.
http://i40.photobucket.com/albums/e223/Charatman/ghsdbgxf.png

[Maverick]

You guys are seriously paranoid over nothing. If you don't want people to see what you post on a public internet forum then don't post it. It doesn't matter if someone takes the time to register to see the image or if someone views it as a guest.

If the yaoi or whatever anime bothers you that much remove it from your diary and have it go some place else. Jess can start her own if she wants so you don't have to be paranoid and worrying over nothing.

The only way you can hide pictures is if you upload them as attachments and disable guests from viewing attachments. But then the downside of uploading attachments are the size/dimension restrictions placed on attachments.

Not liking "lurkers" isn't enough justification to restrict guests in my opinion.

[MoveAlong]

I agree with Ant
This could restrict all guests. Plus, the diaries show diversity over the forums. As far as pictures go, I don't see a need in that. I mean, imo it's not really a big deal...so it's a whole bunch of Yahoo! spiders. Yahoo is a crappy search engine and therefore needs constant bots to search criteria for a prolonged amount of time, while Google's software is so much better that they're in and out in a flash, almost never seen.

And there's always a risk for sabotage or stealthy adults trying to snatch a teen. In fact, a fundraising forum my mom was on got jacked out of $5,000 because of a sneaky con-man that was a GMod then Admin.

So the risk is always out there, because this forum has a puberty forum, a mental illness catagory, and basically because it's a teen site.
I think our rules are fine


and I vote no on everything...

[Antares]

I think that is a great idea.
I would not want my pics to be able to be seen by anyone on the web.
Lets get some security so no random person can come along. They would have to go through a process. And if we do who is it gonna hurt? How is it gonna effect people. Why protest?

[Maverick]

I would not want my pics to be able to be seen by anyone on the web.
Then don't post it. You realize anyone can see them. The internet is a very public place.

Also, disabling guests would just encourage these "sick people" and "lurkers" to join and they're more of a risk as members than they are as guests.

[Kiros]

Ok, about that idea of blocking images from guests... I don't think it would be such a hot idea. I do not think vBulletin has an option for that, although I might be able to create a hook for it. The problem with blocking all images from guests is that all of the styles that we have depend on images for the style. Now if I made the hook just for the postbit's IMG tags, then I suppose that could work, but the only thing that would resolve is guests being able to see posted images - which I don't think is a problem. Basically, it wouldn't help us any other way because most of the images posted are not private images and it wouldn't help our bandwidth either since VT does not host a great deal of the images.

Now about those diaries and member forums... I don't think it's a huge problem to have people looking at things that they would otherwise simply have to register to view. While restricting diaries to members only would help our bandwidth, it might also simply annoy members that don't regularly login and decrease registration rates. I've honestly thought about doing this in the past to ease the server load, but I don't think it's worth losing possible members.

On that note, maybe we could give something good to the community - to those few thousand people that decided to register. Maybe a member's only set of forums? ... Well, I suppose we can discuss that later.

[Antares]

i think that members only sounds good