Over the years many guests have been this site and the most frequent question I get the most is 'why are there so few message boards & messages'?
Well, the answer is that guests can only see very little. Most of the boards & messages are restricted to members who have varied access to different forums here. The "Guest" level sees almost nothing.
Like all online sites "'bots" and "crawlers" plague TRU. If I do not restrict access they harvest everything, eat up all of the server resources, corrupt the viewing & posting ratio, harvest usernames, (though very little shows here), invades privacy et al.
Also, if everything on here gets copied by these programs, (many of which are malicious), then there is no point in anyone coming here to read posts, articles, etc.
There are more reasons, but that's the gist of it.
What does registration require? A username and a valid E-mail address. That will get you access to the basic forums.
Those who have a deeper level of interest in reading and interacting, will access to more over time... as one would expect.
hey. You mean that I cannot see all of the forums?