The Rebelz: Community AND Clan

One of our more recent ideas to improve/change TRR involved getting a higher yield out of the accounts that register on our board. For those of you that don't know, only about half (at best) of the accounts that register actually end up posting an application and getting accepted into the clan. Even fewer of those people end up ever coming back or staying active. Taking this into consideration, one of my ideas proposes the following...

TRR could run a community alongside the clan. This will NOT change anything about how we run the clan itself; think of it as something to increase traffic and directly feed forum members into TRR (of course these people would be those without a clan; organic traffic brought by the community from search engines). We'd essentially be a clan with some Public Forums. In order to implement this, the vast majority of our forums (and their threads/posts) will be viewable to all guests. Guests, however, will still not be able to post. A new member group would be created, for now we'll call it "Community Member." All accounts registering will be automatically accepted and moved into this new group. This can either be done solely through email validation with the help of an anti-spam mod, or possibly with the current method (email AND admin validation). Either way, people registering on the forums will NOT have to post any form of clan application to be able to post.

Now, you're probably wondering how we'd go about separating the community and the clan. There would be several of the current forums hidden from Community Members, such as "Clan Events," "Clan Discussion," etc. Whereas Community Members would ONLY see the public forums, Clan Members would have access to both. People would apply to the clan (if they so wish) AFTER having been automatically moved to Community Member after registration. This would also allow the clan to easily implement a trial period with new recruits without making the process seem ridiculous, as most of the forums would still be open to the Community Member.

Would this greatly increase activity? Honestly, probably not. Would we be any worse because of it? No. The Diplomats would also be in charge of inviting other clans to join our boards (we'd offer forums for Clan War Results and other more 'community' things similar to Zybez)

Update: this has been partially implemented.

Guests can now view ALL posts/threads/forums except for the clan-specific forums. Yes, people are watching you. o_O
Community Members are converted Clan Friends/Applicants. They can also view all forums besides clan-specific categories. Unlike Guests, however, they can post and take part in our board's community.

New Forums: Community News + Community Discussion (more to come)