A feature which is becomming increasingly more important to me is the private forums feature. Personally I think a very useful option would be to shape a forum depending on usergroups.
So for instance regular users or people who aren't logged in would see one forum structure, whereas people in a special user group would also see additional forums which the others can't. This way the regular users don't even know about the existance of these special forums, as they only appear to a select group of users.
well good news then this feature is already implemented in threads <img border="0" title="" alt="[Smile]" src="images/icons/smile.gif" />
you just need to create a new group, add some users to it and then define in the forum that only this group has access <img border="0" title="" alt="[Smile]" src="images/icons/smile.gif" />
yep <img border="0" title="" alt="[Smile]" src="images/icons/smile.gif" /> it works exactly the way you want and only users with access to the forum can actually see it <img border="0" title="" alt="[Smile]" src="images/icons/smile.gif" />
Yep, it's a very useful feature but it can make you paranoid too. Wondering if there are other forums hidden from you. <img src="http://www.terranbbs.com/ubb/images/graemlins/shifty.gif" alt=" - " />
True, but you'd probably be even more paranoid if you saw several other forums... that you couldn't access. <img src="http://www.terranbbs.com/ubb/images/graemlins/shifty.gif" alt=" - " />
It makes it easier on the admin if those forums simply don't appear. Otherwise you'd have to "mask" the names and on top of that you'd still have people badgering you about why then can't get in.
So, I could create a main index page with only one category in it for "everyone", that only tells visitors to login, but create user groups so that registered users can see the forums they need when they do log in?
Sounds like a lot of extra work on our part, but if it will work...
No it works great. <img border="0" title="" alt="[Wink]" src="images/icons/wink.gif" /> It increases registrations a great deal. You customize the privledges for each forum. The "guest" group applies to users who aren't registered/logged in.
I have a how-to on creating "teaser forums" poste here at threadsdev.com
You'll need to register/login to see it. <img border="0" title="" alt="[Wink]" src="images/icons/wink.gif" />
Encouraging people to register is not a problem; we get uninvited people trying to register for our private BBS every day. Those are the folks we want to keep out completely.
I'm still not sure your method will work for us, but maybe I'll download a trial version of Threads and see if we can try it. Thanks for replying.
