Opening up forums for public access.

What would you guys think about making some of our forums publicly viewable?  Non-logged in members will never be able to post (I never designed the system to allow anonymous posting anyway), so we don't have to worry about garbage accumulating.

Back in the pre-KongHack days, hacks were posted in the forums.  We didn't have a separate system for managing them.  Now that we do, hacks are rarely posted in forum posts.  The game displays are already setup to check if a member is logged in or not, and provide different displays based on login status.

Basically, I'd like somewhere to point brand specific domains, pages / sites, etc. that doesn't immediately throw a 403.

Thoughts?  I'd like at least the dev staff to weigh in before any decisions are made.  We also need to decide on which forums we want to open up, since access is determined on an individual forum level.

~TiM

let guests see what users can see ( but unregistered members must complete a survey to get a 24 hours pass to see hacks)

hacks are never publicly viewable.  The only public view for hacks is the game view that you see at the top of dedicated forums, like this one: https://konghack.com/forum/248-sas4_zombie_assault

I don't see any problem with that, problems can came only with free posting (spam) or hack stealing and both cases will still impossible.

Until forum admins are in full control of the page that can be viewed and the amount of thuigs guest can do a little opening can surely give the forum a little push.
 

fine with me

As long as the hacks are kept private, I see no problem with having public forums

its an aye from me

What about hacks that are posted on the forums? Some people do that, so could there be a "hide from guests" option for parts of a post?

Post hacks as hacks, not as posts.  We don't want to encourage posting hacks as posts. :P

I think is a good idea, since probably the tutorial posts would attract a lot of people (and posible new users) and maybe the page getting the good benefits from it, and if not... well there is always the way to revert it back no :s?

Of course.  Public/Private forums are just a setting in the DB.

So will there be a toggle setting for "Private" or "Public" or just sections marked as private or public?
And also, if there is a toggle, will you be able to make some posts public and others private?

That wouldn't make a bit of sense.

So could users decide if their post is going to be public or not?

No