Private forums take location on each forum via the internet. They are most typical in hiding staff rooms, so administrators and moderators can have exclusive (behind the scene) discussions about the forum, without having members peering and leaking out facts. This is how it need to be.
Some forum owners, hide all their forums from visitors and only enable access to them when a member registers (or has an activated account). The only sorts of forums which should really have their entire forum private are, family forums, individual forums, organization forums etc. Why? Considering that they are not attempting to gain public members but rather contact their clients/friends. If you are attempting to gain members for your community, and your target is forum growth, your forum will need to be public.
Here are 3 reasons on how privatising your forum will impact your forum success.
If I can't see what I'm joining for, why should certainly I bother?
Some men and women choose to turn their forums on private to maximize registration rates. Example: they will want to register, so that they can see what the community is like. But typically, this strategy will backfire and result in the total opposite.
Members typically decide to register since they see the content or a discussion which they want to reply to (interact with). So don't forget, keep your forum opened to the public. Allow them to read your discussions, if they feel its worth it, then you have scored a new dedicated member. But if you force visitors to register just to view those discussions, extra than likely, they will turn away and never return.
Hiding something from us? I'll pass.
To some visitors, the reason why forums are set to private is mainly because of illegal activity (trading music, copyrighted programs, softwares etc) or other activities which they don't want the public to see. Specially those music and movie forums which call for registering before gaining access to go to the forums.
This is one more reason why setting forums to private may perhaps affect your forum growth. It will impact on your registration rate as members don't wish to take any risk in joining the forum mainly because they 'assume' there might be suspicious activity going on behind the scene which in most instances isn't true. The bottom line is, visitors could have misinterpretations on your forum.
Search Engines can't Index you!
For any community that is seriously searching to grow, this is reason sufficient. Search Engines provide massive amounts of visitors for forums. Turn your forum public so it enables search engines to view your content and also index it into their search engine.
Each and every topic made on your forum is a prospective advertiser. If your forum is set to public, each subject is indexed within a search engine. (Eg. Google). For example: If you made a subject about 'Photo Effect Tutorial(s)' and someone searched those key phrases in Google, they could hit your result and view your forum. Depending on the top quality of your content and if they like what they see, you might possibly have scored a new member. Just remember, let those search engine spiders crawl your forum and not close the door on them.
If search engines can't index your content, you are cutting off a potentially massive source of traffic and limiting yourself in a truly unnecessary way.
Just don't forget, there are several negatives towards turning your forum private. It affects your registration rates significantly, is that what your aiming to do?
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