Logged in as guest

[awndray]

I want to bump this topic.

As of right now, there are currently 219 users online. 104 members and 115 guests.

Why don't we privatize a few more sections so that people are forced to log on? We might even see a few new faces.

Still agree with this.

I'm in total agreement.

We have had it open in the past and we have seen more growth since we opened the forum for most sections to read. People see how we conduct ourselves and join because they want to join in, not because they have to.

We would rather have open communication with those that want to be apart rather then those that are only members because they have to.

In light of of comments made in the recent Search Function thread, I'm bumping this old thread.

As of right now:

There are currently 429 users online. 9 members and 420 guests.

Call be cynical, but while I understand the rationale as explained by jwire above, and while and it's obvious that we're being watched by our overlords, my impression is that these 420 "guests" aren't here for open communication or even to be a part of the community. I don't believe that asking people to sign up and be signed in to read the forums is much to ask. But maybe that's just me. As explained, they join because they want to join. If they don't want to, then they probably don't really want to read our conversations all that much. If they're just here to snoop and gather intel, so be it. At least registering helps cut down the what might be a whole lot of bots harvesting data.

[Aniest]

my impression is that these 420 "guests" aren't here for open communication or even to be a part of the community.

I would guess that about 320 "guests" are bots of some type from Google, Bing and others, as well as those set up by anti-gun people and organizational agencies. The other 70 "guests" are likely people who got sent here by a bot, someone searching a topic and GOC ended up one of the links. The last 30 will be the individuals here, as you say, not to be a part of this community.

Don't kid yourself though: needing a log in doesn't change the fact that everything on CGN is logged by Anti-gun people, groups and organizations. I don't doubt that one of the reasons the names of logged in people is hidden now (I believe years ago the logged in names used to be bottom of main forums page with the other stats) is because active members got curious of the organizational bots, the names that were on 24/7 but had a zero post count. I can also say that a log in doesn't keep the anti-gun people from being on the site and taking notes as I got one of those in the family. Oh, and that person is here too taking a lot of notes about certain members and what they say, more than happy to bring select quotes to the people who write anti-gun legislation.

In the end the decision to make what parts of the site open and what parts limited is up to those making the decision based on readership, participation, sustainability, image, revenue and so forth. If anti-gun people and organizational agencies are reading, recording and/or quoting everything will not be stopped by a membership log-in so that should be on the bottom for reasoning; and only Google bots and the like will be stopped by it, and that may not be a good thing to stop in every case.

[spider69]

Posters,whether members or guests,would do well to remember that there's no such thing as a closed internet site,especially,ones such as these even with a "secure log-in". All "anti" organizations regularly monitoring these sites is well known. Also,intel gathering security organizations have unfettered access to every aspect of sites and forums such as this simply from the standpoint of tracking people whom may be regarded as risks to national security after some of the sketchy posts against political figures and/or posters or even lurkers from out-of-country networks. There's no such thing as privacy on the internet.......period.

[awndray]

There are currently 598 users online. 12 members and 586 guests.

[Doug_M]

I’d wager most are bots used by ad, spam and hacker networks.

[awndray]

For sure. And there are ways to block those..

[RangeBob]

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[blacksmithden]

For sure. And there are ways to block those..

There are, but the technology is always evolving. You plug a hole, and they find another.

[harbl_the_cat]

A lot of those "guests" are people who find public GOC posts through web searches.

Over the years, I've gone back and found my old posts simply by Googling topics I posted about before.

That's one way for a forum like this to grow - by having good, public content that's easily search engine optimized.

The downside is anyone can find it, theoretically.

The upside is most people who find it will find it based on topics that they can find through a google search and a lot of the traffic will be focused on that content to begin with.

I stumbled upon an ANTIFA forum that is also public a few months ago but I doubt that anyone here would be able to find simply because the odds of most people here searching for easily search topics that those people talk about is quite low.

Also I was doing some very advanced hackery to find them... it's seriously like going into the twilight zone seeing what some of those guys talk about. They talk a lot about the same sort of gun related stuff we talk about, but then they go on Doxxing witch hunts, reputation and career assassination, coordinate boycotts with leftists political groups, and of course, organize riots... it's REALLY creepy.

I'm pretty sure the site operator here know which forums get the most traffic and keep those open for search indexing. It's a good strategy to promote growth.

A good way to make money is to have private forums that are only accessible to logged in members OR that can only be found by sharing links. Both have different use cases that can be used to generate growth, revenue, and community.

Interestingly, YouTube does this too. There's 4 different states for YouTube videos from monetized partners: Public, Private, Unlisted, and Membership. Public is optimized for Google / YouTube search. Private and Membership are by creator invitation only, and unlisted is by shared link only.

This is how web content naturally organizes itself into surface / deep web layers of the internet.

Interesting to know is that content can be both public and deep web. It all boils down to SEO. In that scenario, from a practical standpoint it's almost as good as being secured and unindexable by a search engine.

[awndray]

Bump.

There are currently 327 users online. 8 members and 319 guests

[FALover]

Bump.

If those 'guests' have not been invited, then they are technically party crashers.

[awndray]

There are currently 429 users online. 16 members and 413 guests

[Gaidheal]

Time to turn off the free pipes

[Dewey Cox]

No one is going to buy ad space for a forum if there's only 16 people on it at a time.

[Gaidheal]

So they're selling ad space to vendors telling them there are hundreds while knowing that less than 4% of those *might* be interested in what they're buying ad space for?