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Originally Posted by evulish
I think blocking guests is a very BAD idea. This forum was made for FIRST teams but is still a resource for people interested in robotics. If they're just looking for a quick answer from a question that's already been asked, why force them to register? People looking for a quick answer aren't probably going to want to register (or even be able to find the answer they're looking for). I personally don't think people should be obligated to give anything back. It's nice if they do, but if they don't want to, they shouldn't be forced into it. Also, last time I checked, Googlebot wasn't a registered ChiefDelphi Forums member, and CD has a pretty high pagerank. Knocking off all unregistered users is going to hurt CD's popularity. They won't be able to find any threads on search engines, and even if they did, they'd have to register to view it.
Also, this was just a big traffic spike, it's not like it's absolutely necessary to upgrade hardware since it seems 300 users aren't usually on this board.
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I don't think the notion was to block guests, but rather to create reserved slots for those who took the time to register, giving them priorities over those who don't. They need to register to post anyways (unless they use the search function and find an answer to their question).
Reserved slot's shouldn't be too hard from what I see. I'm not sure about vBulletin, but phpBB grants ever visitor a unique ID number --, make the forums look at the number, if it is a guest/anonymous user, redirect them to a page suggesting them to: login, register, or come back in a minute or so when the traffic dies down.
I also agree with evulish though, in the fact that traffic spikes aren't too common on CD -- a hardware upgrade isn't vital at the moment.