permissions and public visiblity

I'm a bit stuck on permissions.  There seem to be duplicate ways to do them and I'm not clear which apply.  I want to switch off most visibility of everything for non registered users.  As an example.  I wanted to hide discussions from non authenticated users.  First I tried it through forms but it made no difference.  Then I did it thorugh permissions and the discussions were 'empty' for non registered.  
I tried the same route for 'people', first using permissions and then forms - but people are still visible publicly. How do I hide them? Also, is there a way for a user to select whether their profile is 'public' or not?
Tks

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Replies (6)
    • Finally tracked down a solution to hiding everything - hid the navigation block. Now to figure out how to add some text on the front page.....

      • Yep, that is one way to do it. You can also go into Studio > Designer > Splash and enabled the Splash Screen. This way, you will not see anything until you Login or Join. You can customize that as well.

        If you don't want to do that and continue the way you are doing it, to add some text on the homepage, go to Studio > Pages and choose Homepage from the drop down. Add a HTML block there and put whatever you want it in. Make it visible to ONLY Unathenticated.  

        • Thanks so much Chris

          • Chris i was told once by someone that if you enable splash page, that will have an effect with google rating or crawling?

            • I am not a SEO expert but, I do not see why that would affect your rankings/crawling. For example, both Facebook and Twitter are high ranking site and each of them have a "splash" page requiring you to login or sign up at their main homepage. 

              Ranking/crawling is more based on the volume and quality of content at your site. So the more members, content, sharing, etc. the higher ranking possibility you have when it comes to Google searching. Have 20-50 members where most posts are pictures or just "Hey everyone", you are not going to rank very high not matter what 😁 

              Now, if you had your site completely locked down where every page was private and you had a robot.txt file blocking every link, then THAT could affect the ranking/crawling.  

              • That's what i thought as well

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