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Do you allow your member profiles to be guest accessible? Why or why not? Do you allow member contact info (email, IM) to be publically displayed and potentially picked up by spiders?

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  • 1 Year Discussion Span
  • Latest Post Latest Post by roryt
Member Avatar for clarinetalex

Do you allow your member profiles to be guest accessible?.....

Yes, but email addresses aren't available to logged in members even if the members are registered (unless the member choses to disclose this information).

Probably not the best option but profiles don't tell as much about a person as his or her posts and it would hardly be a good idea to make all forum threads private. Most new members come through search engines pointing them to a topic. Thats how I found this place.

Member Avatar for Dani

Thanks for the feedback. Right now profiles are hidden from guests and I'm debating whether to make them public or not. Profiles contain IM info of members, and I'm not sure if that is information many of them want to be spidered. Ya know?

Member Avatar for clarinetalex

Thanks for the feedback. Right now profiles are hidden from guests and I'm debating whether to make them public or not. Profiles contain IM info of members, and I'm not sure if that is information many of them want to be spidered. Ya know?

Well, you could instruct spiders not to index the profile page, but spam harvesters tend to ignore robots.txt so that really wouldn't solve the problem.

I've never really gotten spam IMs and my IM addr is publicly available on the site.

However, I do have a problem with members bugging me every other second, and making my profile available only to registered members wouldn't solve the problem.

Spam harvesting can easily be prevented by using imagemagick and turning IM name text into images.

Member Avatar for roryt

Members on my forum have the choice what they would like to show to people and no information is shown to guests.

Member Avatar for Dani

*bump*

It's been a year later and I am still struggling with this issue. To allow or not allow guests to view member profiles, that is the question. I have two reasons not to:

1 - It encourages more sign-ups
2 - Members have their contact info (AIM, MSN, etc) in their profiles

I have two reasons to ...

1 - Guests get to experience the social networking aspects of DaniWeb
2 - SEO! That is 150,000 more pages that can be indexed

Member Avatar for roryt

Also, if people don't want their im details to be displayed they can just take them off. The whole register barrier isn't really very big anyway, you can tell that by how many people have just signed up and never posted.

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