Guests viewing attachments in private forum!

[BfB]

My very first post here

Anyhoo, I have a problem w/ Guests viewing attachments in a private forum of mine.

It's not private from any normal registered user, though. I will not go into detail of what type of forum it is, but the name of it is "The Penthouse", so you can gather from there what goes on in there

So, I wanted anyone, registered or guest, who went to the main page of my forums to see that "The Penthouse" was a forum, and what the description was, but I only wanted registered email verified users to be able to access the forum. When Guests would click on it all they would see was an announcement telling them that they had to register and be email verified in order to participate in that particular forum.

An Admin of mine has noticed on the "Who's Online" that Guests have been infiltrating it, but only in the sense that they are viewing the attachments. Here is a couple of pix:





and here is one from just 10 min. ago at most:



I've known for a while that Guests are able to view the attachments in all the other forums, but I didn't really know they were viewing them in "The Penthouse" (I have my forums setup so that the attachments are displayed instead of having to download them). One of the reasons I may have not known is that I've had the "Who's Online" disabled for a while, so I've never been able to view it until the last couple of weeks.

To try and fix this problem I have changed, changed again, and continued to change permissions for the forums and for the users. Still no luck.

Currently for Unregistered / Not Logged In I have these Viewing permissions set:

Can view board: yes
Can view members info (including other's profiles and members list): no
Can view others' threads: yes
Can download attachments: no

For that particular forum I have these permissions set:



I'm getting exhausted and frustrated trying to figure out what I'm doing wrong. They can't view the thread directly, but are apparently viewing the graphic URL's from where someone has posted links elsewhere.

Can anyone help me fix this, please? Your assistance will be so greatly appreciated!

Very Sincerely,

James

[Steve Machol]

Have you logged out of your forums and tried to view those threads and attachments yourself? It's the easiest way to find out what guests can and cannot see.

[BfB]

Yes I have, and I am unable to view them myself.

I am under the impression that you're telling me that aren't able to view these attachments then!?!?

Strange, especially when someone posted the picture they pulled off my site on another forum.

Also, mind a lil bit of advice? Instead of wording your replies as you did above, I'd suggest something more along the lines of:

"Though they follow the url, they will get a permissions access denied page. The vBB still will take a query for a Guest on the "Who's Online", even though they are unable to view it."

See how easy and friendly that was?