vBulletin - can it be secretive?

[Vishalsachar]

Dear Friends,

I am about to purchase a lease license or a full commercial license so i can get right away to start making the forum.

However - the forum must be completely secretive. I do not wish for anyone to be able to access ANY of the posts or thread titles or whatever. I do not wish for people to be able to join without our permission or invitation. The problem is that there is a internet hacker/stalker who is being investigated by the FBI but we need pure secrecy.

Can we achieve this and what steps can we take to ensure our small forum will always be safe from such people?

Many thanks,

Vishal

[Floris]

Vishalsachar,

Thank you for your interest in the vBulletin forum software.

You can put your web site behind a .htaccess/.htpasswd protected directory, so only those who know that user/pass combination can login. This is a web server feature.

From the vBulletin side, you can turn on registration, but require email validation for registration and turn on moderate-new-registrations. This way if someone signs up they have to validate their email address before they get accepted, after which the board administration can accept their registration through the control panel > moderate new registrations.

You can set up on a per usergroup basis, who can see the forum, their own threads and threads from others and setup their permission to view, post, edit, delete, etc.

This is also possible for guests, you can deny them from viewing the forum, threads by others, etc. They will be presented with a permission denied screen.

If you require any further information, feel free to ask.