Our biggest question from customers is by far “how can I get more members on my forum?” While we have some great articles in our knowledgebase, I want to go over a new concept today: making things public.

A lot of forums make it so you have to register and login to view content. This is counterproductive in many ways, and will hurt your membership significantly. Here’s two big reasons you may want to rethink making your forum private:

• Search Traffic
  If your forum isn’t viewable to guests, search engine bots are unable to crawl and index content. What does this mean? Your forum won’t be listed in Google, Yahoo, Bing, or any other search engines. This puts you at a huge disadvantage to other forums because less members will join your forum.
• Give them a reason to join
  If all your content is hidden, most visitors to your forum will simply leave. They want to see what the forum is like. They want to be shown a reason why they should stick around. If you hide everything and make people register, you will get less members. Would you buy something in a store without seeing it? Probably not, and the same is true with forums.

As you can see unless your goal is to have as few members as possible, you need to have a public forum. Our research has shown that public forums get up to 30% more members than private ones! To make your forum public just make sure Guests have access to view forums and read topics. If you want help making your forum public just post on our support forum @ http://support.freeforums.org.