[Forum] How do I make a completely CLOSED forum?

[branchesdesign]

Hi all,

Forgive me, I'm new to forum stuff.

How do I make a completely closed forum? I want my client to add users to their new forum and no-one to be able to join themselves. Equally, if someone were to end up the forum home-page and they aren't logged in, is it possible to hide pretty much everything else, i.e. forums, 'forum statistics' etc?

[JulianD]

You just need to disable user registration on the vBulletin Settings page to avoid new sign ups. Regarding the forum homepage, this can be made by tweaking the permissions of the Not logged in / Unregistered usergroup.

If you want to aggressively avoid all kind of traffic from search engines you can use a robots.txt file (see more at http://www.robotstxt.org/) to avoid most search engines to crawl your site.