Member vs Guest access and permissions

[Lane Shirey]

Attention Jamie and the board. 
 

it would be great if there could be a list/grid/ table posted somewhere that’s accessible my both quests and members that clearly shows which parts of the website are restricted to quests. And that list should be sent to every person as part of the welcome message when they register on the new site. With that list could be an easy button to access the area to pay for their membership. 
 

There seems to be a lot of confusion about this with people wondering why they don’t have access to certain areas.  I’m in full support of there being limitations to guests, as it drives membership, but since we’ve made changes, I think we need to reset the expectations of guests. 
 

Frankly, I think we should also limit the number of posts a guest can post (like other forums do). We have certain guests that have posted 500+ posts in one year and are on the forum on a regular basis.  To me, if you use the forum that much to your benefit, you should cough up the 50 bucks. 
 

No need to attack on that comment. Just my opinion.  

Edited January 5, 2022 by Lane Shirey

[Jamie Horner]

Hey Lane, 

It was my understanding the Guests should have access to everything other than the Other Collectibles (Members ONLY) section, but from many of the posts I have been seeing, that does not seem to be the case. I'll have to do some digging and see if I can get that fixed/changed. (Unfortunately, I cannot give you a time frame on having this fixed as I do not yet know what part of the back end of this entire forum is keeping everyone from seeing the Sell / Trade and Looking For / Wanted sections, other than not being logged in...).

And to be honest, I was originally an advocate of more restrictions on the forum than we currently have, but I am not the Board and have no vote in any of those decisions. So anything as far as more or fewer restrictions for Guests would need to be directed towards the Board.

I think many of the issues for many of the forum and website users comes from not thoroughly reading the information on the website (which is free to access for everyone). Or possibly not understanding what they're reading. I did my best to make it as clear as possible, but I'm sure I'm not always perfect at explaining things. Most of the questions I get are about passwords and why someone can't access certain areas. [Or for those of us that don't regularly clear our caches, cookies and browser history, it's "Why is the website not working?" (mostly referring to the old website)]. 

[Jamie Horner]

I think I may have found the permission that was not allowing Guests to view or post in the Sell / Trade and Looking For / Wanted sections. It looks like the Marketplace was being hidden to Guests, even though posting and replying was being allowed, which really made no sense... So I made it viewable to everyone (hopefully). 

You all will have to let me know if that solves a lot of the issues the Guests were having.

[Noah Britt]

I've noticed that on the new forum, guests are allowed to reply to other people's posts. On the old forum guests were only allowed to post on topics they had started.

[Jamie Horner]

Yeah, this new forum is taking some getting used to (especially all the back end controls). I still don't know even half of how to adjust certain things, but am slowly learning. And I was told that the forum was supposed to be "wide open" to all other than the Other Collectibles (Members ONLY) section. So at this time, that's the way it should be working. 

Any other requests or suggestions really need to go through the Board. 

😁