The second sentence sounds like the owners didn't have a choice. That doesn't make any sense. I'm just playing devil's advocate for you here, but prior to me noticing this particular issue I was seeing posts asking "Why is my bike making funny noises?" and " Why can't I bunny-hop?", and nonsense like this. I thought maybe the forum was having a dumbing-down period going on, or a special on membership from 8-year-olds. When, in reality, there was this thing going on, unbeknownst to members, that you'd installed a new feature where the public at-large was entering the forum via your "going to be enabled at any rate" feature. Right?

Me, being a helpful sort of person, thought of numerous problems with all this. First, it seemed at least a few of these new folks were expecting a rapid-response to their questions, seeing as how they'd made multiple successive posts and at least one person was getting aggravated that no one was answering their question. Your new feature appears exactly as those that appear when you're searching for auto parts or troubles and the pop-up comes in asking "What's your Question?", and in those instances there's a (somewhat) live person ready to respond to this request. Here, no one knows, or knew, that some new breed of person was coming into the forum asking questions that had an expected rapid-answer-query, nor did the person asking the question have any idea that their question was going to be ignored simply because the forum owners decided to come up with a new marketing plan which they put into place without notification to existing members who could possible have helped with a bit more speed, or sympathy, had they known such was happening. But they didn't.

Okay, devil's advocate time, again. How can you know this? If people aren't logging in ["non-logged-in members"], how can you know if they have a complaint? Maybe they looked in, decided what they were seeing was stupid, and dropped off. Then again, why should there have been ANY complaints? I'm seeing one of those decisions based on "better to ask forgiveness later..." sort of things. I'm just saying that deciding to do something, and deciding to do something which everyone involved knows about, makes all the difference in the world. Do you have any idea how many people have used your new feature but didn't get a response and have since not revisited the site? There's probably some disgruntled people who'd have not been disgruntled had the new feature been integrated with member notification.

Where I'm going with this is, as an example, in C&V there's lots of posts about 70's-era vintage low-end Peugeots, how much is it worth, is this a PX-10, can I get $500 for my rusty UO-8, etc. We get a lot of these posts, and they're quite repetitious, yet I nearly always find the time to respond to these with what I may know about their bike. Partly, because I've spent a bit of time with these models, and know something about them, but mainly because I'm a member of the Forum, and, like joining any sort of club, feel a certain responsibility to visitors in my club seeking information. I want to help, this is a helpful place, and it was helpful to me when I joined the forum.

A helpful use of this new feature, would be to notify existing members of what this is all about, then when we see some weird post saying "Help, my thingamajig is stuck on my gear changer, what do I do?", then your members might realize that there's some poor non-knowledgeable person with a bike who assumes there'll be a live answerer in the next 15 seconds who can tell them where to put their thingamajig. Otherwise, we all just see that there's been "0 replies" and we mosey on by and don't help out.

This can be a useful feature. Just that nobody got told about it. [/QUOTE]

I never stay logged into anything, just doesn't seem a wise habit to get into. Thanks for your replies.