contemplating opening up the forums

Why are you contemplating do this? I think people should register so we can have a protected community. That way you can get an idea who is interested in the forums. Otherwise you have no way of tracking who or what someone might read of time.

Maybe a middle ground where you could have 1 public forum that anyone could post to, but the rest they would need to sign up for.

Vince

I concur with Vince and somewhat with Montecore. Having a completely OPEN FORUM we might tend to see completely bogus posts to set off the loyal sellers of each brand. The best part of these various dialogues is the bouncing around of ideas amongst those of us with particular allegiances and biases and to open them up to anyone (read that TROLLS) might tend to dilute the value each community receives. Just Saying.

Art,

I could see some positives on your side in terms of page views and ad revenue if you opened the forums.

However, there are already a few open forums that do not have half of P4P's insights and level of exchange of information.

http://www.dnet-km.com/index.htm
http://copiertalk.com/forum/
http://www.smarka.com/members/adframe.htm

You have to think that is because the closed nature of P4P allows people to feel free to open up.

Its your site and you can do what you want, but to me, I see the closed/exclusive nature of P4P as a differentiators from the other guys.

Regarding trolls, one fix would be to require X number of posts and responses per year for membership.

quote:

Why are you contemplating do this?

The main reason is that I did create a public site, basically for the trolls, however all I post there is press releases. It's hard for me to keep up with posting to both sites, I would save a lot of time just updating one site.

But, I also believe that making members register and I monitor those registrations keeps most of the trolls out of our secure site.

I appreciate everyones response and will keep our forums secure.

BTW the unsecure site averages over 100K in page views a month and our secure site averages about 35K in page views a month.