Most people run their Xenforo forum open to everyone. What this means is that you pay, register and you get access to the entire forum. But do you know that you could also run a private forum exclusive to only a few members.
Let’s say you’re running a discussion forum on Senior Care which is open to all your registered members. But you now wish to have special private forum for Carers and that can only be accessed by Carers.
Did you know you could do this? And It’s pretty simple to set up.
Let’s look at how we can set this up.
Step 1 – Create a User group
User groups are like roles. By default there are 4 user groups in Xenforo – Administrators, Registered, Moderating and Unregistered / Unconfirmed. When you need a private forum it’s best to also create a User group. For our example create a user group ‘Carers (Group)’.
Step 2 – Create the new Node
It’s now time to create the new private area to which only the ‘Carers’ user group will have access. Just like creating any other Xenforo forum you start with creating the category node.
Before creating any forums under this category node you must do Step 3.
Step 3 – Make the Category private
It’s important to first make the new category a private category. This should be done before creating any other child nodes under the new category. Doing this first will ensure that all child nodes under the new category will also be private.
Step 4 – Assign the user group permissions to the Node
Now that we’ve made the new category ‘private’, we should ensure that the User group that we created in Step 1 has permissions to view the new category and all child nodes under it.
Once you have set the permissions and saved it, the user group that has some permissions set on the new category node will be highlighted.
Step 5 – Assign users to the user group
And finally assign all users to the new user group. In this example assign users to the user group ‘Carers (Group)’. All assigned users will now automatically get the set permissions and will be part of the private forum.
Don’t know what is Xenforo?
Xenforo is a forum software that was developed by former vBulletin developers. I have found that version 2.x is pretty easy to use out of the box .
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