Hi.

Going by the demo at http://www.softaculous.com/softwares/forums, your forum software appeals to me very much, but before putting in time installing and testing I need to know if it meets two requirements that are critical to us.

1. Creation of separate groups/forums that are completely closed to non-members. No one can even view posts unless they are a registered member and logged in. For example: Only members of the Badminton group can login to, and view messages in, the Badminton Forum. Same goes for the Table Tennis Forum and the Kung Fu Forum and so on.

2. Members must be able to opt to receive e-mail notification of *ALL* posts made to their particular group/forum, including *COMPLETELY NEW TOPICS* or responses to existing topics.

The number of people eligible to join each group will be small -- I should imagine around 30-50 maximum, much less for most groups/forums.

Any advice much appreciated.

- Rosie.

Hi Rosie,

Let me try to answer as good as possible

1. A) You can create separate categories/forums.

B) The entire board can be hidden for non-members. Or only specific forums.

C) Different levels of access to forums can be given to a certain 'member status' or individual members (on username basis). There is however, no default option to create 'user groups' and assign permissions to those groups.
I don't know difficult it would be to realize that. There are lots of aspects to think of. Search feature for one thing.
Don't know how dynamic the group of users is. But it might suffice to manually add the users to the ACL of the forums.

2. If a member creates a topic or replies to one, they have an option to receive emails on new replies to that topic.
There is no default option to receive emails on every new topic or reply, in a forum. Pretty sure that would be categorized as SPAM very soon.
But, this is something that we could add for you.




If you would like people to stay updated on the activity going on, they could do so with the "Today's Posts" link..?

All in all, I think XMB could be a candidate for your purpose.

Kind regards, Patrick