What Information to show to guests? What features do our Users really need?

Hi

I run several health related forums in Germany.

In the last few month I made lots of changes to my forums
especially in regards to what I show to guest.

After spending hours on thinking about my main forum and
how to make it even more attractive for my visitors I came up
with the idea to remove all unnecessary information that reduce
the signal to noise ratio.

First of, why does a guest need to see the "what is going on" box?
What valuable information does your visitor get from it?

Some will say that it shows that the community is active. Yeah, maybe.
But Post and Thread count do the trick as well.
Lots of noise removed.

Then what about the Forum posting rules? Did you ever checked them?
As a guest? More noise removed.

What about the thread tags. Nice idea for a blog but poorly implemented
into vBulletin. Just look at the admin interface for Tags and you want to puke.
Tags disabled and more noise removed.

What about active members browsing a forum or thread?
Do I really need to know as guest that member XY is currently reading the same thread as I do?
No? Do I want to know this as member? No? More noise removed.

On your forum homepage, does a guest really need to know how many threads and
posts were written in each forum? For what purpose? To see that a forum is "not that active"
because it has less posts then he/she expects? Does that really tell the guest about the quality
of your service and/or content? No?
More noise removed.

And if you want to see how clean a forum can look for guests without all that noise visit:

www.AdsenseExperts.com

Think about it! It's good for SEO too by the way

And what about all the features of your forum that you installed or are build in by default?
My users hardly used the vBulletin Blog but many got confused by it and wrote questions that
never got answered because they wrote them in their blog.
Blog removed, more noise for members removed.

CMS? Never used it in the first place.

Thread tags? My member didn't use them, I didn't. More noise removed.

StarBuG

What is the best way to remove the posting permissions or is it just to deleted it from the template?

I used conditions first but then removed it completely because when did you as a member checked the vbseo posting rules the last time on this forum?
Never? That is why you simply could remove them completely for everyone.

I agree, what template did it appear in?

FORUMDISPLAY and SHOWTHREAD template

Removing unnecessary things is a very clever idea. But over removing will hurt you as well. For this reason i love basic themes and i recommend you vbseo own seo theme.

I could care less about WOL but I do think it looks suspicious when I see no Thread/Post count view info on Forumhome.
When I see a forum that shows no stats, I back away like its a dark themed gamer site...

Your SE guests won't see those stats anyway because they will land in a SHOWTHREAD thread...

Originally Posted by webmastersitesi

Removing unnecessary things is a very clever idea. But over removing will hurt you as well. For this reason i love basic themes and i recommend you vbseo own seo theme.

I stick with my own themes, they are proven to work very well SEO and Visitor vise

Originally Posted by melbo

I could care less about WOL but I do think it looks suspicious when I see no Thread/Post count view info on Forumhome. When I see a forum that shows no stats, I back away like its a dark themed gamer site...

Your SE guests won't see those stats anyway because they will land in a SHOWTHREAD thread...

Removing some stats like on forumhome does make user focus on the content and not create
a decision based on numbers that don't tell you anything really.
Worked for my forums so far but might could have negative effects on other forums, I don't know.
But I really doubt it though

good workaround starbug. thanks.

i did this for ex. signature etc. as well.