Splash or Index?

I've been running a very highly visible site for couple of years now.

I have great placement on all search engines for my site and keywords.

I get lot's of visits, few sign ups.

What I'm curious about is how your sites have done with guest able to view some pages of the site or a total block to a splash page with the site description as some sites I see are going to.

Who uses a splash and has that helped you gain memberships?

Did you use a splash and switched to normal site behavior? Allowing guest to view some of the site?

I used the built in Dolphin tools to control what a person can see on the index page instead of one of those splash.php redirecting things.  Dolphin has the controls to limit guest viewing so no need to create complicated splash code pages.

On our site, we really stress privacy, so we shut out most guest viewing.  Members can still post things as public but navigation off of that public content is blocked to guests.

this was my conflict too. i thought that splash with some members photo will make a solution 

but finally i kept it open. totally, maybe until i make profit through membership. gotta gain some more members...

i also suggest boonex to blur avatar which member has set his privacy to members only.

anyway i am thinking about 3 things:

1. in join make a checkbox (set to checked by default) that allow view by to members only

2 auto set "allowed view to members only" on registration (and undo it by settings)

3 blur/foggy avatar and photos (or blocks) to non-member, content aloud-this way the will be curios to non

members and they will join