Administering Your Forum
You have now set up your forum for administrators and moderators, but there is a potential drawback—you would have to discuss your plans in view of the other members. Fortunately, you can make this forum private so that only administrators and moderators will have access to it. You do this by setting up permissions.
Forum Permissions
In vBulletin permissions enable you to set up forums within your discussion board that can be used only by the members you want.
We will now make some changes to the access permissions for the new forum. To begin this process, click on the drop-down box next to the Admins and Moderators Only! link, choose
View Permissions, and click on Go.
This now brings up the Forum Permissions Manager page.
We are concerned with the section of this page that deals with the forum that we just created.
At the moment everyone has access to this area, but we can change this easily. There are two options:
•We can click on Deny All and then specifically allow access to the Administrators and Moderators user groups.
•We can deny access specifically to all groups except Administrators and Moderators.
It is always safer to deny access to all and then allow in the user groups that you want, so this is what we are going to do now. (The other way is prone to leaving out a group by accident.)
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To begin the process, click on the Deny All link.
This changes all the usergroup permissions for this forum, denying them all access. The page then reloads, and all the usergroups are now displayed in red showing that they have been customized manually.
Yellow alert
If the names of usergroups appear in yellow, then they are inheriting permissions from a parent forum. In the example forum, this would happen if we changed the permissions on the Main Discussion Forum, which is the parent forum of both the Big Boards! and Small Boards! forums.
Right now, no one can access the forum! Let's change that.
Click on the Edit link next to Administrators.
The page that is displayed now can be used to customize the forum permissions for administrators.
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Administering Your Forum
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The next part is the tricky part, and you need to take care. To reset the permissions to standard administrator privileges, you need to set all the options to Yes apart from Always Moderate This Group's Posts (unless you want all administrator posts to be moderated by moderators, which is unlikely).
However, clicking the button marked All Yes changes all the options to Yes apart from Always Moderate This Group's Posts. This is a little-known feature, and users of vBulletin are often unaware of it.
Scroll down to the bottom of the page, and click on Save. You can now repeat the process for the
Moderators usergroup.
Viewing Permissions
We will now look at two features of the Forum Permissions Manager page that will make your life a lot easier.
Firstly, there is the color coding. The name of each usergroup is displayed in one of three different colors according to that group's permissions as follows:
•Standard: These are displayed in white. These usergroups have default usergroup permissions.
•Customized: These are displayed in red. These usergroups have custom permissions.
•Inherited: These are displayed in yellow. These usergroups have custom permissions inherited from a parent forum.
But it's not just the colors that help you navigate the forum permissions page. If you take a look to the left of the usergroup names, you will see solid dots and open circles in either red, yellow, or white.
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