phpBB :: Knowledge base

How to create a private forum?

There are a lot of reasons to have private forums on your board. e.g. a closed forum for Moderators so that they can discuss User Behaviour or Forum Rules. If you offer forum hosting for clans they would need a private forum to talk about tactics or internal team problems.

All this can be done very easy in phpBB in combination with the new Usergroup and the Forum Permissions Feature. What we want to do in this short explanation is to create a Usergroup which will be able to access a for other Users which are not members of this group invisible and not accessable forum.

Lets go.
We will start with setting the Forum Permissions. In the Admin Panel click on Forum Admin -> Permissions. Select the forum you want to make private in the Drop Down List and click on Look up Forum. You will be presented with the Simple Mode Drop Down box. You can now select Private[Hidden] or Private.
Private[Hidden] means that Users who are not allowed to use the forum will not see it on the Forum index. If you select Private those Users will see it in the Index listing but still won't be able to enter and read it. You can fine tune the permissions if you click on the advanced mode button, e.g. If you don't want every member of the forum to be allowed to create polls you should set the Poll Create button to MOD (only Moderators would be allowed to create a poll) or ADMIN (only Admins would be allowed to create polls). Press Submit and the forum permissions should be set up correctly now. Of course you can change the permissions whenever you want.

Now we will look at the Usergroup Feature. If you already use the feature you can skip the following 2 paragraphs.
Click on Group Admin -> Management. Now we press the Create a new Group button. You will be presented with a screen where you enter all the important information for the group. If you want to be the moderator of the group (the moderator has the ability to add and remove Users from a group) enter your own name in the Moderator field. We will select Open Group (Users will be able to request to join the group and the moderator has to approve the request before they are members). Closed Groups does only mean that no one can request to join the group, and only the moderator can add members manually. A Hidden Group will not be visible in the User Group panel for other Users.
After we created the group we have to add members to it. This is not very comfortable at the moment but will hopefully improve in 2.2. Return to the Forum Index and select the Usergroup button. Select your newly created group and add click on View Information. Now you see all members of the groups. You can enter the name of a User in the textfield below the list and press Add Member. The User will now be a member of your group. Continue the procedure until all members you want to have access to your forum are in the group.

The last step is to set the Group Permissions.
We return to the admin panel for that. We choose Group Admin -> Permissions and select the group in the list. We are looking now at a list of all forums. You will see that only the forums which have access set to private will have a the extra box for Simple Permissions. Just change this from Disallowed Access to Allowed Access. You can of course use the Advanced Mode again which allows you a little more fine tuning.

Ok, I hope this tutorial is helpful. Remember that english is not my primary language. Feel free to make suggestions.