Passwording Forums/Threads - What are my options?

[MikeJeffs]

I am intending to launch a forum which will discuss certain products (mainly books). I only want owners of the product to be able to read and participate in such discussions.

The ideal way for this to happen would be for a user to be prompted to enter "the first word from page 5" as the password when they try to access the forum for a particular product. Even more ideally they should only have to do this once.

The process of authorising users access to such areas needs to be automated, as potentially there will be 100s of different products, 1000s of members and those members will be buying various products all the time.

How would you go about doing this? Is there functionality already built into vbulletin that could facilitate it?

Any advice much appreciated.
Thanks.

[Wayne Luke]

When you create the forum, there is a place to enter the password that you want to use. Save the forum and all regular users will need the password to enter the forum. They would need to enter it once per session. When the password has been shared around enough, you can change it by editing the forum.

[MikeJeffs]

Great, I completely missed that password section. That's a pretty reasonable solution. Is there anyway to do a similar thing with individual threads? Depending on the number of products I end up with, it might be wiser to have public forums for "authors" with password protected "threads".

In terms of how it effects users vs adminstrators - I anticipate giving the author of the product admin rights inside their own forum, allowing them to create stickies, delete posts etc. This is something I can setup manually, but how can I stop them having automatic access to product forums belonging to other authors.

Thanks

[Wayne Luke]

There is no password protection for threads.

You can make people moderators of individual forums. However to keep them from accessing other forums, you would have to create usergroups or use access masks.