What you just showed us isn’t an example of requiring registration to see content, it’s content reserved for paying customers, the thread titles serve as an advert for the subscription/payment/whatever is required to become a “supporting member”. That perfectly illustrates our point really, it’s not typical behavior in a comunity.
If you’re curating specific content for paying customers then take another look at the admin pages, Discourse doesn’t offer that functionality out of the box. Patreon integration for example requires a plugin, it’s not a part of core. Administering paying user memberships either means adding code, manually promoting users, or integrating SSO and member roles with another third party source.
If you’re doing any of the above it’s not a huge leap to curate a list of specific paid content behind your paywall.
That’s a ridiculous straw-man argument. It would be user-hostile to subject them to responses from anonymous users. Facebook allows users to set access control on their content. Search engines won’t show private posts, titles to private posts aren’t published to entice registration, which is what you’ve asked for above. If a user wants it to be public then it is, in it’s entirety; if it’s private then again it is, in it’s entirety.
I suppose that depends on the community, or how you view what a “community” is. Regardless, I was asked for an example of what I mean, I gave one. The example was to show a method of displaying thread titles, without content.
No, it’s not a strawman. :S Just so I understand you, you’re making a differentiation between google indexing content to entice registration, vs un-indexed, Is that your main issue? Or am I not following you on this?
The first one is casting a wide net and hurts people coming in from SRPs for dubious benefit (… you get their email address? your “registered users” number goes up?)
The second one has limited scope (people definitely interested in the content) and has concrete benefit for the site (money is exchanged).
I understand, and my point is… regardless, I like the feature. Just because something can be used for dubious reasons doesn’t mean it will. The second one you pointed out is proof of that, and the way Discourse is currently set up will not allow for it to happen.
Actually, the way Discourse is set up makes it possible for plugins to do all sorts of things. If this is something you want I think that’s the approach you should look into.
Agreed, I’m simply arguing against this logic… all forms of topic visible content is not, is “bait and switch”, that’s nonsense.
I have no problems with developers doing whatever they want, and if they don’t what to support this by default, no problem. I’ll sort myself out.
As a separate question out of curiosity, why is there a “Lounge” area for only trust level 3 set up by default, which no one will ever know about until it magically appears one day? Unless I’m not understanding (which is possible), I’m actually curious as to what that’s about.
So what we’re talking about is “degrees” of “advertising”?
Even if we grant that showing topic titles without the content isn’t something that is desirable (which I don’t), what’s the reasoning for not showing the existence of the category at all?
I’m working with several communities that have lots of content that is of interest to only a subset of the community (e.g., mineral rights in a particular state, a society with many geographic and issue sub-groups). They have a need for there to be a bunch of categories that people can know exist, but not have show up in latest. The solution seems to be to use groups to keep them from showing up, but then it’s difficult for people to know that the stuff is there, and having to join a group to see it is cumbersome.
I think that the solution to the problem (given that the problem is not getting deluged with topics from categories you’ll never care about and not charging for people to see them) is to mute all of the niche categories for new users.
A site and/or category setting for a default watch level for categories could be very useful. For example, you have an Announcements category that you are pretty sure that everyone in your organization should be watching, and you have six regional offices that are of interest only to people in one regional office. Default settings would set new users to watch/mute those categories.
Another way to solve this problem is to make those categories read-only for non-supporting members. This solves the problem of people (and search engines) needing to be able to see the stuff. People who see that useful conversation is going on there will want to pay to be able to participate.
You’re correct, and I can see that working in some communities. However, I think that it is entirely dependent on the nature of the content. If the content was say, informative in nature… people would obtain the information without ever participating.
Another problem with this feature not existing, is for communities that share sensitive content. I want people to know that we are talking about the content, but not have it be indexed on Google or seen to the general community. This is especially true in the field I currently am in.
So you actually believe that’s easier than throwing out the idea to add more permissions to categories?
(a feature that has been fairly common in forum software as I understand it). You’re not being very logical here.
You’ve been given several examples when asked… instead of trying to offer a workaround, just be honest and say… “it’s my forum software, and I don’t want that feature”, or “you want that feature, go somewhere else”… problem solved.
That would be especially helpful for any future request about this feature since you said:
I think you are missing the point. Discourse is open source. It is entirely possible to write plugins that work with Core code. Plugins are not work-arounds they are work-withs.
I just wanted to throw in here that I have a use case for this feature that has nothing to do with advertising and monetizing. I’m interested in this feature for a non-commercial forum for people to discuss sensitive psychological issues.
