Public Forums and Private Forums

[apexwin]

We are looking at purchasing VBulletin, but I had a couple of quick question first.

Can you have both Public and Private forums in the same liciense of Vbulletin? Basically what we want to do is to give visitors the ability to view and add threads to most of the forums, but also have private forums that based on the login our beta testers could see, and some that would only be viewable by employees in the office. Is this possible through groups or something else.

The second question is can we set up the forum so that only if u register can u view the contents of the public forums? I suppose u can do this because if u want to you can charge to be a forum member, but how if u don't want to charge?

Thank you for your help I have looked through the online documentation and believe I have the correct answers, but want to be 100% sure.

Thanks,

Jeff

[Steve Machol]

1. Yes

2. Yes to first part. But I don't understand the second question.

[apexwin]

I made the second question more difficult than I should have.

Basically I want to know if I can keep visitors from viewing the forum unless registered.

1. Yes. Ok. But where in the manual can I find out how to do this?

Thanks for your quick reply

Jeff

[Steve Machol]

Yes, this is a simple usergroup setting.

For info on setting up forums and permissions, the place to start is here:

http://www.vbulletin.com/docs/html/forums_moderators
http://www.vbulletin.com/docs/html/usergroups

[feldon23]

You've got lots of control over access.

You can create a Guest forum where unregistered users can browse but not post.

You can create forums which are password-protected.

You can create forums which are only visible to certain user groups (I also use this on my forum for the same reason -- for Beta testing!).

Actually starting with vBulletin 3, users can belong to multiple groups. So you can have 2 different products in Beta testing and overlap between the 2 groups. This was not possible in vB2. :)