Attention Lurkers and Visitors !!

Hi to you all I know that you are out there somewhere , watching from a safe distance.

While don't you sign up as a member , pull up a pew and sit down with a cuppa to join in with us ; we're not that scary well most of the time.
There's no need to hide

We'd love to hear about your garden and roses.

cheers!

Guest/ visitors and lurkers can't see the forum anymore unless they register and log in ....one of the new changes that has been done....

Okay.
Perhaps we can change the title to "People Who Register - Then Lurk "

that might be an idea.....

heehee I did that for a lil while to start with, til I got brave enough to come out from under my rosebush! Meeting new folk can be intimidating, especially if you think they all know much more than you, and are going to find you silly and a waste of time....

Courage people, on this site, "silly" is a welcome trait, highly sought-after! Especially if you drink coffee, and try to acquire your "neighbour's" roses, while searching the ether for that new, just-discovered treasure! (or your local nursery..)

Sorry, but I think it is sad the forum is now closed to anyone but members. It makes it impossible to "try before you buy", which I, for one, want to do before I sign up to a new site. And lots of people feel shy at first; why not let them lurk, for heaven's sake? I fear that, in the long run, turning the forum into a private club will lead to a shrinking membership and we all know where that ends up.

Apart from the secruity side of things....if you ever look to see who is "Online"...you will notice say 2 or 3 registered members and 15 or so guest ...as the guest always out number the members. The thing you don't probably know is that the admin have access to ip addresses as all admins do on every forum(no exception) and they can see who the guest are and where they are from. 99.9% of the guest are bots and spammers that are always trying to get into the forum and do damage. This is why the admin check all members joining, otherwise the spammers will have a field day.

To make forums work nicely you need members, not guests. As members we are a productive lot and get on well, but having said that , you also need new members with new inputs to keep the forum alive without it going stale. Before as a guest, you have access to the whole forum and the knowledge of the people on here without becoming a member and why should they become a member if everything is open to them. Also open forums are great learning curves for hackers. They use these type of forum to try out there destructive methods and it is a right royal pain to bring the site back and it is never the same way as it was before it was hacked. I have been on the recieving end of hackers on my own forum and I had know idea what had happened or how to bring it back-but I learnt and it cost me a lot of money.....

These are just a few thoughts and there is more reasons as to why a so call close forum is better than a open one.....

I certainly sympathise if you have had a bad experience, Neptune. Nothing worse. And yet thousands of forums and blogs do stay open without any destructive results. Early in the life of this forum, Simon closed it to anyone but members. I thought that a pity and I did not join until it opened to all. It's been open now for almost three years and the security measures taken seem to have been sufficient to keep us all as safe as anything is safe on the internet. A bit of risk goes with the territory. A bit of risk goes with life.
A closed forum that feels safe and cosy at first, becomes, after a while, claustrophobic...and finally lonely.

Cd there be so-called "public areas" and being able to see but not post or respond to posts, or ... or... stuff?
Definitely don't want spammers, scammers or any other troublesome elements either....

or they cn do like I did n just hover on the fringes AFTER joining up til they feel brave enough to plunge in and not worry bout getting in over their heads

lildeb wrote:Cd there be so-called "public areas" and being able to see but not post or respond to posts, or ... or... stuff?
Definitely don't want spammers, scammers or any other troublesome elements either....

There are are areas that they can see and some topics on the portal, but at the moment they can't view the forum itself.....

Just log out for a couple of minutes to see what the passing roselover sees.

All very interesting to read your different comments.