UBB.Developers Forums UBB.threads 7 Development How Do I? allow people to see forums that they cant enter

It would be nice if it was possible to make some forums so that people who is not in the acces group can see that the forum exist when they see the forumlist.
if they try to enter they would get the, you are not in the right group or something like that.

like an appetiser to get people to get there membership...

can that be done ??

Thomas

I don't know if that can be done, but check out the teaser I set up on my site.

The teaser forum is read only for guests, but set to no access for registered users (registered users don't need to see it anyway). I put the Bennefits of Registering forum in my members only catagory. So the members only catagory is displayed to guests, but the read only teaser forum is all they can access

i like your way to do that..

but cant the other thing be done ???

Thomas

It probably can be done, but imagine yourself as an unregistered user clicking on forums that they can't read and getting error messages. I see two problems with it from a design perspective:

• Unregistered users would get frustrated clicking on things they don't have access to and eventually leave your site never to return. That would be the number one reaction to setting up forums that they can see but not enter...
• How can someone tell a "legal" area from the areas that they can access? After getting two or more error messages they might assume that the entire forum is restricted and they would leave.

I really think it's best to set up a teaser forum that unregistered users can see, but registered users cannot.

You could even make an "unregistered" forum for every "registered" forum that you have...

Why not make a small mod that adds a field to the boards table which tells if the board should show up as a teaser on the main index if the user isn't allowed to read it?

Honestly, I don't have time to dig into it right now.

I understand what kordegnen wants, but from a design perspective I still think it's a bad idea. If I went to a site and kept clicking on links only to find out that I don't have access I'd leave. I wouldn't even bother bookmarking the site, and it wouldn't encourage me to register. The more frustrating you make something to use the less likely people will use it...

Yeah, that's not what I meant. I just meant a small hack to make it easier to create teaser forums, which I guess could be quite tedious if you have lots of forums unaccessible by guests.

Purhaps just a simple mesage somewhere that simply says 'hey, if you register, we also have X and X etc forums available' ...something like that - that simply gets their attention and lets new users know there is more available as an insintive to register

That would be practicle. In fact it would be easy to add another table to the ubbt_unregistered.tmpl file that contains the names of the forums that are available once you register. Right after $tbclose add



That table will be displayed under the menu table on every page, but only for unregistered users. No clicking on links that don't work and it would be a constant reminder that there is something more for registered users

Nice idea

Thanks