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If guests and people who don't have an account could view the beta forums the Google spider would index them, and beta forum page links would start showing in Google searches. That might be why Theymos decided to only allow logged in users to view the beta.
Two reason we're not making the forum public without login, and this is one of them. The other is to discourage use of the beta until we're ready for you guys.
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doesn't google follow the robots.txt directives? Not that it's really my concern tough, anything Theymos decides is OK with me (on the subject of the new forum i might add)
Google does and quite well actually. We're actually hoping that they can also crawl JS built pages as well since this is a single page app.