No, I know what Dave is on about. it won't effect the rankings, the feature that Dave is on about is used for registered memebers of the board eg if you're registered on the forum it will ask you to reply in the thread to unhide the download links etc. when you reply you're able to view the whole thread then. As for the guests, well, they can't post anyway ... unless of course the message board has been set to allow guests to post, if so they would need to do the same as the registered memebers ... reply to the thread to see the download links etc. I Hope that made sense.
I've seen it done on a few forums. I'm not sure how you set that feature though, I don't think it can be done with Vbulletin tbh. I've seen it used mostly with Invasion Boards.
I'm going to look into that myself for passion actually.
