Image visibility to non-memebr visitors

[arash_hazeghi]

It would be nice if images in the Avian forum would be visible to visitors without an account, I know signing up for a basic account is free and easy but unfortunately 95% of the visitors don't bother to do it.

The traffic would also increase significantly if images were visible to everyone.

[Chris Ober]

They can read just about everything and see the Image of the week and Year photos. They'll have to register to see the rest.

[arash_hazeghi]

I know Chris, I was asking that what is the wisdom behind the policy that they can't see the avian forum images...

[Chris Ober]

Helpes keep image crawlers from combing the site, sucking down bandwidth and individuals from copying content in bulk. If they have to register to see it and start grabbing large amounts of data, we can cross-reference the ip traffic with the username.

[arash_hazeghi]

Interesting so why do sites like smugmug don't have to worry about this problem? They have a much larger image pool for potential predators.

[Chris Ober]

1) We're not SmugMug or other image sharing sites. Smug's images are stored on Amazon's servers, offering virtually limitless bandwidth and storage.
2) How do you know they don't have to deal with it or care enough to want to stop it.
3) I can easily find oodles of forums that don't even allow reading the text of posts.

BPN offers a completely different service and it was decided to restrict free viewing to those that register. It's not a lot to ask. If that don't want to register because they don't agree with it, then they are free to browse for pretty pictures on some of those other sites.

[arash_hazeghi]

Thanks Chris for clarifying,
I don't think people don't register because they don't agree with terms, it is just cumbersome and many are afraid of spam , especially registering with their email and real names. I thought I'd give some feedback, hope it was useful

Regards,

Arash