Member vs. Non Member

[dclassens]

Today at work a customer was asking me about aux fuel tanks. I jumped on my toolbox computer and typed TDR1 in the address bar to give him suggestions. I NEVER view TDR at work and was NOT signed in. I could view almost all forums and posts(Politics, Other, Pay it forward, 911 etc). How much can the non member do on this site? Can a non member make a post or respond? can they get TSB's, Tech References, 911 archive? I know the red and black font, and I know a non member can post a for sale car, but I always thought for the last 5 or more years my $35 got me some web site perks.



This is in no way a complaint about the site and I would never cancel, I just think a potential new person my say to him self why pay when I can get the diesel scoop for free. I thought ALL red font items were blocked.



dave

 

[Hoefler]

non-members can not post comments.

 

[Steve St.Laurent]

There are quite a few things you can do as a member that non members cannot do. We opened up some of the member forums for viewing by non members to increase traffic and ad exposure for our advertisers. We left the members only tag on the forums for now to give us the easy option to close them to non members again once we see how it goes.

Right now the Pay it forward and the Website forums are both members only - even though you can see the forum name itself as a non member if you try to go into the forum you can't see it.

Non members cannot:

post anywhere on the site with the exception of the classifieds

do searches in the forums

view more than the 1st post on a thread that is older than 7 days old

view the travel companion information

view any information on your profile pages

use the chat room

view TSB's

We try to give non members enough of a view of the site to see what they would get by being a member without opening everything up to them. That is a balancing act. If we clamp it down too much then they won't see what they could get by joining. There are also those that won't join and will accept the limitations and with those we can at least get some ad revenue from them to help support the site to keep it cheaper for those that are members.

All of the red items on the menus with the exception of those forums that we have opened up are members only. I just talked with Robin and for now we're going to remove the members only notations on those forums which are now open for viewing by the public (with the 7 day restriction still in place on all of the forums).

 

[rbattelle]

This is good to know, because I do occassionally post things that I don't want non-TDR members to access easily.

I think maybe the "other" forum should still be members-only. Give us just 1 forum that is unavailable to non-payers. Other than this one.

Can non-members see our email addresses, web sites, or other items that appear in the drop down menu under our username?

Ryan

 

[Steve St.Laurent]

No, non members cannot view your profile nor can they send email, private messages, etc. I'll get with Robin on the other forum.