I am trying to setup a membership model, but I would only like to display the first topic that users create, and any replies, and feedback are hidden showing some content that they must REGISTER providing them links to login to see the full content.

Has anyone ever come up with a solution for this?

Some will probably think, Why not just have the entire forum hidden?
Well I thought of this method, but realized, I would be losing out in terms of SEO for the content topics and first topic, which typically google is indexing.

I read this post which provided some good examples:
http://www.seomoz.org/qa/view/52261...-forum-seo

I am just trying to see if there is a way to hide everything but the first topic to a security role..

Thanks

Does anyone know if this is possible, to only show the first topic, and have it wrapped with a TOKEN somewhere in the template to have replies only visible to people in a specific role?

bump.. Looking to see if there are any suggestions

I guess this isnt a possible solution, so I am planning to set the permission of the forum pages, to only allow members only. Visitors wont be able to view the content. But I had to provide a way that google can still index the content, for the member pages.

So I found this topic: http://www.inceptor.com/blog/2010/1...tion-page/

1. Google’s First Click Free Program

Google recently introduced a new program for publishers of content that is protected by a login page. Called “First Click Free”, participating publishers allow the Google crawler to index their subscription content, then allow users who find one of those articles through Google News or Google Search to see the full page without requiring them to register or subscribe. The user’s first click to the content is free, but when a user clicks on links on that free page that lead to additional restricted content, your website can show a registration request / login page.

Also, thanks to an update to the FCF program, you can now limit users to no more than five pages per day without registering or subscribing. If you’re a Google user, this means that you may see a registration page after you’ve clicked through to more than five articles on a given website using First Click Free in a day. As Google says, “We think this approach still protects the typical user from cloaking, while allowing publishers to focus on potential subscribers who are accessing a lot of their content on a regular basis.” The Wall Street Journal is a high profile case where this FCF program is being used.

How it would work
• You enroll in the FCF program and allow Google to crawl all your content behind the registration page.
• You could selectively prohibit certain documents from being published in this manner by using the “no index” tag and/or the robots.txt file (this needs to be confirmed).

Benefits
• Makes restricted content available to the public in full (using Google Web Search no partial viewing of documents is possible through FCF).
• Restricts how much content a user can view in one day to five complete documents.

Issues
• Makes restricted content viewable only through a search on Google, not to general website visitors.
• Users can view up to five complete documents each day – this might be too many documents for you.
• Content pages that contain restricted or sensitive information would each need to be protected using the no index tag/robots.txt method mentioned above. If you have a lot of this type of content, this may turn out to be a prohibitively large amount of work for you, and it would need to be done in advance of enrolling in FCF.

Adam,
So sort of like "Experts Exchange"? I have not looked at the AF templates in a bit...but something in the template where you could wrap replies in a [ISINROLE:Subscriber] ... your replies template [/ISINROLE:Subscriber]

would work.

Yes that was the approach. Typically the first post is what gets indexed by google, from what I've seen.

So allowing that first original post to remain available was my original plan, and the ideal approach I think.

Below that I wanted to have some information that showcased those people not yet logged in, with some information/graphics explaining, that if they want to participate they must register, and join our subscription.

Would is ISINROLE work in the current build?

Well unfortunately after a quick scan through the template guide tokens this doesn't seem to be supported (conditionals within template based on logged in user role). That said...maybe AM knows something about this can could post other alternatives.

Steven,

Yes I went through the guide as well, and didnt find anything.

I know ventrian used the same sort of token, which is a great way to control security of data.

What about perhaps using the forum viewer to show topic titles visible to all site visitors, then at the main forum instance, set module security to registered users only, and drop an HTML/Text module on the forum page that is visible to guests only.