so how does he protect access so far?? I thought that the wwwthreads whiz would use wwwthreads for this purpose anyway

Apacha auth_dbi would use a database to do htaccess authentication using the database (anyone hacked this already?? if not, I will some day)

Then the same feature could be used for the access for the special authorized paying user's board

If the list of paying members is somewhere else, I am sure someone can hack a perl program that reads all members off that list and enters them inte a group called paying_members