Users vs guests

Ok thanks, found it. Looks like it is only on the frontpage and the forum frontpage.
And if I am not logged in I show up as a user on the Forum and as a guest on the frontpage.
When I log in I also show up as a user on frontpage.

Hans

We, the IVRPA, need to figure out how to get more of those Guests to become Members

Douglas Aurand
Albuquerque, NM

Note that visits from users coming from google and just seeing one page also register as users, as do robots. Oh, and you don't have to be a member to be a user.

Aldo
What's the difference between a User and a Member?

Douglas Aurand
Albuquerque, NM

Any user (vs an anonymous visitor) can post comments and create new topics in the public forums. Members have paid their membership fee, and can also read/post to the members-only forums. Additionally, members can post gallery items, and member profiles can show much more information than free user profiles.

When you're not logged in, you're being served a cached version of the pages you visit. A cached page 'lives' for about 15 minutes - half an hour I believe. So the 'who's online' block is not accurate when you've just logged out; the cached page you see was created when you were still logged in.

I just logged on at 8:35pm EST on Thursday night and it suggested 9 users and 260 guests were online. How do we convert you guests to become members? Are we missing something from our membership that would be valuable or are we giving too much away? Just a thought. . .

Hoyle

Hoyle, ever tried googling your own name? Your IVRPA profile is the first hit. And your name is not the only term for which this is true.

Everyone who comes to our site through google constitutes a guest, and will do so for a couple of minutes even if they went away to another site after mere seconds; our site can not actually see when people go away to another site, it can only see if they load another page from our site after finding their way to it.

Also included in the 'guests' number or search engine spiders. And that's not just one spider from google, one from yahoo, etc at any one time; all search engines have many spiders at work and they may be spidering the site at the same time.

So, yes, 260 'guests' seems like a lot, but it does not mean (by a long shot) that 260 people are reading our forums, following our blogs and looking at our work at the same time. Do not read too much in that number, my guess would be that 90% of the 260 guests are here for no longer than a few seconds.

Ha, at least on my end Hoyle's WWP profile beats out the IVRPA one by two slots...

Running a Google search for my name shows the WWP profile 5 slots ahead of the IVRPA lsiting -- and only one listing below my own Web site!

Whew, a couple years ago all you would get was jazz listings for "Doc" Cheatham. Nothing wrong with Doc, but I feel better today. :)

Patrick Cheatham
--
CheathamLane | spinControl:VR
Berkeley, California
VR Photography
Web, Flash & QuickTime Development

Patrick
I think that needs to be done, quickly

Douglas Aurand
Albuquerque, NM

Unfortunately, filtering out the non-member users is not as straightforward as it may sound.

The 'find a photographer' page alone provides 3 distinct ways of listing/finding people. When you All 4 mechanisms are provided by Drupal 'modules' that are blissfully unaware of the members vs non-members concept. While this functionality can be 'hacked' into the relevant modules, this means that the 'hacks' will have to be reimplemented on every subsequent update of the website, be they security updates or updates with new functionality.

And even if the functionality would be implemented using hacks, we still would have a problem that the mechanisms for finding someone are the same mechanisms our webteam use for user management and when helping users becoming members etc.

Less hacks = less headaches.

Having said that, it is not true that non-members have the same benefits and findability as members; you may notice that in every search result there are users with a greenisch gradient background (and a subtle 'member' mark) and those without. When you select one of the 'non-green' 'non-member' users, you will see that their profile page is extremely sparse. They can not list a website and they can not list contact information. No biography and no gallery items. So even if they are findable, they can not even be contacted, and members always look better. The only information that is 'active' on their profiles leads to other profile listings.

On the user map members are marked with an IVRPA marker, while free users are ghostly white.

Before i start, i don't want to complain about the site Aldo, as you have done an excellent job, in fact probably much better than the rest of the IVRPA panel expected you to ever do.

The only gripe i think we all have is that when we pay, fair enough , we have the option of adding images and movies to the galleries and that we can see an extra members only part of the forum, but that's not really enough to convince people to sign up.

I did a very quick search and found the first non member user
http://ivrpa.org/user/721

To have on his profile a basic (non linkable) link to his own site allowing him to advertise his products to the world on here, and then which i found much more scary and annoying

http://ivrpa.org/profile/profile_country/Netherlands

There are non members above real fully paid members in this list.

The only thing i did notice though, is that the track section of their profile never showed anything up, so unless from the 10 or so i tried haven't actually ever added anything to the forums, then you cant view non members tracks.

Can you not block non logged in people from viewing the forums and blogs, so they will have to do a free sign up to get in, this means it will increase the amount of people you have on your members lists, who may in turn then feel it more beneficial to pay the small amount per year and become a fully paid up member.

You will also have a load more email addresses to send newsletters to, if and when that ever starts, to remind people about the site and bring them back in.

I'm also aware that the last option there could effect SEO, unless there is a way of allowing spiders in but not browsers.

Regards
Ian

www.NewWorldDesigns.co.uk
CMS Systems, Web Design, 3D Animation

www.QuickTimeVirtualReality.com
Object, Pano, Multinode, QTVR, Flash, Java

> To have on his profile a basic (non linkable) link to his
> own site allowing him to advertise his products to the world

A non linkable link? What's a link if it does not link? ;-)

Members have the opportunity to advertise their products and services directly on the site, and link to whatever sites they like. Non-members can only place text in their profiles (and indirectly link to other users' profiles).

> http://ivrpa.org/profile/profile_country/Netherlands
> There are non members above real fully paid members in this list.

Currently, these lists are sorted by last activity on the website, which admittedly is suboptimal. On the other hand, so would sorting by name; you'ld get cheeky people signing up as "aaaaaaaaaldo rocks" just to be on top of every listing.

> Can you not block non logged in people from viewing
> the forums and blogs

This totally defeats the purpose of having blogs, forums and indeed a website.

> You will also have a load more email addresses to
> send newsletters to,

Erm... not on my watch. 'Opt out' is out of the question, IMHO.

But like I said... it's not a question of "don't want to do" but of "can't do, without a lot of hassle".

Aldo
I think Ian is talking about "users" like this

http://ivrpa.org/user/721

He has a text only URL as a company name.

I'm not sure how you would police this

Douglas Aurand
Albuquerque, NM

When was the last time you had to copy, paste and enter a url, and didn't think that sucked?
I know that's what he meant, but I find that to be a bit of a moot point. That's not a link.

>That's not a link

Your right its a Non Linkable Link :oD

Your also right it does suck having to copy and paste URLS, but i have done it. I'm sure there must be ways of banning certain words for certain types of people in the admin, such as .com, .co.uk, .net, etc. This is possible in most forums like phpbb, SMF and vbulletin, and can be even configured to be only there until a person has written a certain amount of posts, or until they have been manually upgraded to a higher level.

I'm just trying to find ways of making this website more attractive to people to part with their cash to help pay for its development and any extra school trips out to the pub, i mean conferences. It just seams at the moment very little incentive for this to happen.

Also if they were forced into registering into registering to see the forum and blogs, it would not only give you the emails that they could "opt in" when registering, but also give you much higher stats resources.

Most people would probably opt in to a newsletter they know and trust wont sell their email address to others and will be full of content that is useful and from the industries leading experts.

The Who's online bit would be then much more accurate, as for them to be viewing you wont get as many Guests and more Users, of course excluding spiders and people who have found us by accident.

But I don't know which forum you have used and what options you have in the admin, so its just an idea.

www.NewWorldDesigns.co.uk
CMS Systems, Web Design, 3D Animation

www.QuickTimeVirtualReality.com
Object, Pano, Multinode, QTVR, Flash, Java

Aldo
If there's only one VR photographer listed in the city/town the person doing the search is in, they'll cut and paste it. And they'll never check the city/town just 20 miles away where there's an IVRPA member

There's me and a non-member, if some one searches "Albuquerque"

If I was a potential Virtual Tour buyer, I'd check out both listings since there is no differentiation other than the amount of information. A company may actually require 2 or 3 quotes before awarding a shoot, so there may be an incentive for them to "copy & paste"

I understand there are technical problems, but I just have a problem giving any kind of advertising/listing to non-members.

Some of us wonder why we didn't get a shoot and the really crappy (low priced) VR photog did?

It may be because his costs are lower because we Members are paying to advertise our competition.

Does that make any sense?

Douglas Aurand
Albuquerque, NM

Aldo
I think we got too wrapped up in the techical and forgot the function says "Find a VR Photographer"

The users of the search tool have no information in the results why some have more info than others. It doesn't say "Full IVRPA Member" or anything give the paying members a higher status in the "searchers" eyes.

My first choice, by far, would be to not have the Non-Members show up in a Photographer Search at all, the second would to make it very clear what the difference is between the "Members" and "Users" is.

Users should definitely not be able to list their company name and location. That might solve 90% of the problem

Douglas Aurand
Albuquerque, NM

I have added a notice on non-member pages, and removed the non-linking company info altogether for non-members. Ofcourse that last measure will cease to be effective when people start to use domainnames as usernames, but we'll cross that bridge when we get there...

causa finita

Aldo locuta est...

:-P
Patrick Cheatham
--
CheathamLane | spinControl:VR
Berkeley, California
VR Photography
Web, Flash & QuickTime Development

Aldo
Thanx for doing this.

Take a couple euros out of petty cash ;)

Douglas Aurand
Albuquerque, NM

> sometimes the site also gets hit by lots of spam-bots.
> aldo has built things up really well to handle this, but
> they probably up the user count a lot.

Not really.

Requiring 'users' to sign up using an active email address before they can post cuts away a lot of 'spam-bots'. And the math questions you sometimes have to answer (silly though they are) also help keeping things tidy.

Sure, sometimes someone slips through (like 'nareman' yesterday), but they're typically not a bot ('nare man' is dutch for 'nasty man', my guess it was someone looking to see how far he could go).