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Guests not allowed

by jamaks
4 replies
  • WEB DESIGN
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Hello All. could someone point me in the right direction please. I am looking to build a private members forum where before you can gain entry you must have been given a temporary password.
The forum scripts I have looked at so far do not appear to give the option of excluding guests.
When I have found the right arangement I shall be applying further security such as password protecting the directory housing the forum but would like to find a script that at least provides the basics of guest exclusion. Thanks for your time, and any suggestions. Jim
#allowed #guests
  • Profile picture of the author mchelle
    I would probably use s2member and bbpress wordpress plugins - they integrate beautifully and seamlessly together. You could make it so they have to pay $x amount to access the forum, or you could handle registering the users manually, though that could get tedious after time.

    vBulletin also has a way to do subscriptions/private forum areas but I am not experienced enough in it to tell you how, and it can be pretty costly to get a license.
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  • Profile picture of the author jamaks
    Hi mchelle, thanks for the quick response. I do not use wordpress so that would also provide some work that I could do without. Certainly have to agree that the costs mount up pretty quickly when looking at off the peg private forum solutions.
    Password protecting the directory may be enough to fufill my purpose but it would be nice to find a forum script that just does the job for me. Thanks again. Jim
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  • Profile picture of the author Bryan Zazz
    I don't know how much access you have to your server, or how comfortable you are with writing code, but what you are looking for is called "authentication", and you can protect your web content to only members - and exclude guests - with a few lines of server code.

    That caveat being said, here is an example which I used some time ago,
    it helped me understand how authentication works.
    This simple example does authentication in 8 lines of python code:

    Authentication example (without any script)

    Again, depending on your requirements, you will want to elaborate on this example.
    So you may use this as a starting point.
    Again, this assumes you have control over your server (Apache) with mod_python module.
    Good luck!
    (hope this helps)

    PS. Apache and the mod_python module will cost you $0,
    all your costs will be in the time you invest in learning to make this work.
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  • Profile picture of the author jamaks
    Hi Bryan, and thanks for the suggestion. Do not have full access but have done a little with .htaccess files and have come across, if I can find it again, some snippet of code that does a similar function through the .htaccess file.
    It appears then that all the freely available forums scripts insist on allowing guest access? May go the route of a commercial private forum if things work out. Regards. Jim
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