Sometimes, when i'm out, i might find a computer at a place i cannot log in (for obvious reasons) and want to quickly visit the forum to check out the new posts.
It's a private, members-only section. I quite like that.
On another forum that I visit, you need to be logged in to do anything at all. A third forum, a Proboards much like this one, also has a private members-only section -- and it's generally used to gossip about the second one, of which it is an off-shoot. Let's not do that here, but I'm sure there are still benefits to not everything being public.
Shouldn't be a problem. Just log in. I was just a little shocked to see only the top sections when I traveled and used my laptop, and that computer hadn't been logged into this forum (which I only discovered in June).