Search Engine Bots Acting as Users

I was wondering what T2DMan's feelings on this were:

http://www.vbulletin.org/forum/showthread.php?t=108070

I have read through the posts on that thread.

I personally try and stay on the right side of the search engines.

Although this is not cloaking in the "bad" sense of keyword stuffing pages, it is cloaking never the less. Personally, I allow guests to see everything, and make that default view as search engine, and user friendly as possible.

An unregistered person should see the same as the se robots.

You open yourself right up to people dobbing you in.

Having such a add on also encourages people to have specific templates just for the search engines, something that I dont agree with.

I saw mentioned that you could specifically let the adsense robots to see registered members content - but this is a totally different concept to cloaking with the general se robots.

After some consideration I don't know if any search engine would consider this link cloaking, although I could be wrong. Personally, as a general rule, I would avoid anything that has even a slim chance of damaging my SE results. Another issue to consider would be actually keeping track of the number of search engines out there. Even though the minor engines may not get as many users as the big three, its still important to consider. I understand where you're coming from though since I have wanted to restrict access to my own forums to encourage new people to join and participate. The tradeoff to having all pages spidered vs. only a couple though seems too great.