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Index of Subjects Hi John, On Fri, 3 Mar 2000, John Nemeth wrote: > I would like to get a general consensus on whether people think it > would be a good idea to restrict guest accounts to only reading > webpages on the local machine. We have done this in Victoria. The > reason for doing this is to encourage people to register for accounts > as opposed to just logging in as guests all the time. What does > everybody think? I think it's a great idea, provided that you have about 10,000 information providers on your site that users can browse. Otherwise I think the guest users are going to find it so restrictive that most will go away very dissatisfied. That's very _unlikely_ to encourage them to join, IMHO. Here in halifax, we found that guest usage amounted to 2% to 5% of the total logged in time, and about 5% of the total sessions on the text service. This has not changed since we have added PPP service (no guests on PPP.) Some guest users continued to operate that way for months, but eventually they want access to e-mail, and easier access to URL's, and either join or go to other providers. We don't allow guests to enter URL's explicitly (using the ghttp://... shortcut) although they can jump from link to link from the pages they can access (and no doubt some have found the links to the search engines, where they can go anywhere, but most of those search engines are very unfriendly in text mode.) And of course we don't allow e-mail or news browsing. Still, it seems to be enough. I would say that word of mouth (i.e. a friend showing you the system, and then walking you through the registration) is still our major source of text service users. Ed Dyer aa146@chebucto.ns.ca (902) H 826-7496 CCN Postmaster http://www.chebucto.ns.ca/~aa146/ W 426-4894 CSuite Technical Workshop Religion Page Editor, Chebucto Community Network http://www.chebucto.ns.ca
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