Feedback Advanced Search & Feedback for members only!

[ikeo1]

Hello Again,

Tonight I'm looking for feedback on limiting certain aspects of the site to registered members only. This is an effort to protect users from people who might be looking from outside in but wanted to get some input to see what your thoughts are.

As mentioned from the beginning, Advanced Search takes a toll on CPU, and would eventually move to registered guests only. Don't worry, this isn't a paid feature, its free for everyone who is registered.

This is to protect against scammers who might want to use our search function for something hot. This of course makes it harder for someone who's a passerby but they can still view classifieds, its just not as easy. Also, the search function for the forum will not work for anyone who's not a member.

Do you think it closes the door or is it necessary this day and age to be secure. A lot of these is due to a recent uptick in requests. I can mitigate it in other ways, but its one of those things. If the public can see it, so can bots (from all over the world).

Update 9/24/24:

We've also opted to make feedback and member profiles also restricted to logged in users.

Let me know what you think in the comments! What's your ideal community? Do you want it more semi-private or open borders?

 

[Dennis]

Open borders rarely enhance anything. Searching should be limited to logged in members. I use Brave as a browser and never save cookies. I surf sites as a guest most of the time. If I want to post, search or see pictures, logging in isn't that difficult. Resource management is a good thing.

 

[DrJonesUSA]

Hello Again,

Tonight I'm looking for feedback on limiting certain aspects of the site to registered members only. This is an effort to protect users from people who might be looking from outside in but wanted to get some input to see what your thoughts are.

As mentioned from the beginning, Advanced Search takes a toll on CPU, and would eventually move to registered guests only. Don't worry, this isn't a paid feature, its free for everyone who is registered.

This is to protect against scammers who might want to use our search function for something hot. This of course makes it harder for someone who's a passerby but they can still view classifieds, its just not as easy. Also, the search function for the forum will not work for anyone who's not a member.

Do you think it closes the door or is it necessary this day and age to be secure. A lot of these is due to a recent uptick in requests. I can mitigate it in other ways, but its one of those things. If the public can see it, so can bots (from all over the world).

Let me know what you think in the comments! What's your ideal community? Do you want it more semi-private or open borders?

Absolutely I very strongly support limiting certain functions to registered members only!!!

No question.

F-U, CA DOJ!!!!

 

[ikeo1]

We're starting to clamp down on some things. I've added Member profiles & Feedback to the list of gated resources... Guests will not be able to see member profiles or feedback unless registered. This is another step to protect user privacy from the outside world.

If you have a classified listing, this is still open to the public. So there's a mix of public and private data.

If anyone has any issues with this, please comment to discuss.

 

[-D.M.-]

Okay, so, coming from multiple forums in my past that were not publicly searchable or indexed at all on SEO databases...

I've yet to see a net negative on something as innocuous as putting resource-hungry features behind a registration wall. With AI and bots being so ubiquitous today, scraping the various subforums for god knows what, you'll probably halve the load on the system by doing that. And protect the user base from all manner of scams and spam.

And like you and others have said, you're not paywalling these features or making it so that you can't browse the site without logging in. So I don't think it should cause any problems or make for a diminished forum experience at all.

I also think to the thousands of purported "visitors" on CGN and them essentially trying to close the barn doors after the horse got out by trying to cut down the bots, scrapers, and malicious actors after the forum has crashed and burned and absolutely do not want to see that happen here.