It would probably help the site out if you didn’t require people to create an account in order to view the content. Not everyone wants to post, and sites like Reddit don’t require it, even for adult stuff.
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When we created this forum there was extensive discussion about how to handle this and after hashing out the pros and cons we unanimously decided that mandatory accounts was best. The previous forum we were on was open to guests and that lead to a lot of problems which were more of a headache than the small hurdle of asking new people to create accounts.
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Sounds like there were a lot of compelling con’s for this debate, what was one of them?
@g_nsf Just my own recollection of the old site. I do remember bots being an issue where things unrelated were being posted such as random articles with no correlation to the community, advertisements, etc. I’m sure there are some other major con’s but that to me stood out the most.
Hmm, posting access wasn’t asked for in the OP. The only downside I can think of allowing people to browse without an account would be downloading any locally-hosted script files, but they’re tiny.
Something to think about. Not my server, just fwiw.
I won’t list any names, but some people were also uncomfortable with the site being publicly visible for privacy reasons. It’s easier to get doxxed
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I am totaly fine with the account. For people who contribute, this should be no problem at all.
If creating an account is too much work for users who never post or never say thanks for the free content they get here then for my side I don’t care about this issue.
@g_nsf
We have over 7328 users of which only 5378 reached the basic level and only 228 reached the member level. So about 3% of the users invests some time to contribute in one or another way.
Please answer me this question: Why should we care about the other 97% who just grab the free stuff and leave just to make it even more easy for them? How we will benefit from this?
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counter argument is that the more people who join, the more people who will possibly contribute. If we just assume it’s 3% of people who are active, the more users, the more active people.
Requiring accounts to view the website is a point of friction that reduces the total number of users.
Also, we are able to make attachments (ie script files) only downloadable by people with accounts.
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But I see the next question then: “Why do I have to register to download files?”
Is this a global setting? Do we need to upload the files in a different way then or does the site manages this?
I agree with the argument from hugecat.
I do think that people without accounts should be able to view the content. But nothing else. No downloads, no creating posts or threads, not being able to view other users profile and all the other settings users have. They pretty much get teased by all the content we have in here.
There is a high chance people will make an account, so they can download the scripts. There is no other site, that has such a large amount of various scripts. If they want custom scripts for their device, they have to go over eroscripts.
That could lead to people start to contribute more. Maybe they get interested in scripting as well. Or they contribute in other ways with software and such.
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I think you could make a Member section for special script so only members or Trust Level 2 can view those scripts. We also have a section for Level 3 so this should also work for a script section I think.
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When stating that open accounts would encourage more folks to join and possible create more input and scripts, and also state that about 3% do that, I would believe that 3% of the new folks trying to visit this site would also join and have an account. So I would expect that the ones that join would be worth having. Not so much the others perhaps.
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ah i recall in the beginning that some very important community members were not comfortable moving to this site if it was publically viewable. And unless they tell me otherwise, I’m going to assume that they still hold this view.
I like the discussion, but I’m very unlikely to change visibility settings unless these people reach out to me and say that it’s okay.
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I feel like unless you try your own hand at scripting you won’t appreciate the time and effort that goes into these free scripts. I tried to script and can honestly say that it is a huge service to give these away for free. I am more than happy to provide feedback and participation until I can pay for it without bitcoin 
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As a new user, and new to this kind of toys. It is important to start being noticed either reviewing the scripts, giving thanks for the material or trying to find more videos. But in my case I’m still trying to figure how to start scripting (being a Mac user) but I already have some videos that I would like to try and share.
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My take is it’s probably easier for the people making the decisions to make it mandatory. So that’s what we got…
However, I think you could argue for the success of all this stuff in general, it would be beneficial to have no login and get people some free scripts as easily as you can, how many have encountered someone who has a launch who said it’s bad because they just tried some junk interactive experience that’s not like a quality script, instead of seeing what can be achieved they just write it off as bad. Minimal barriers to entry to getting to some free quality scripts, would serve to grow the community and the market, as more would eventually convert to buying paid scripts.
But ya know… could also just say nah porn studios or whatever will grow the market themselves and you can just not care…
I’d prefer to have this site be mandatory/somewhat shielded from search engines because I’d prefer to not get a ton of links nuked (if someone’s going to take them down I’d at least like them to make an effort 
). This is also one of the reasons why I usually title my scripts somewhat generically as opposed to the verbatim scene title. Those are just my two cents though.
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Do we need to accept the initial premise that this site needs helped? Things seem to be working great.
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We could create a script category for lvl2 and above, but I’m not sure if that’s desirable? It seems like an odd (perhaps unnatural) split of the category.
This seems like a tangent from the original convo, so I created another topic here to discuss
@Husky thanks for bringing this up.
The mods were discussing on how to allow the site to be open to the public while also keeping certain things like Script Requests and Scripts behind a login wall. We think we’ve figured out a decent way to make the site make sense for both login users and non-logged in users.
But I got a little hasty on the transition. I’m of the opinion that we’re okay to open up since we’ve locked away some areas to logged in users only. Let’s continue the discussion, and maybe set a timeline on if/when this transition will happen