I've been considering making my
Spoilers, Rumors & Previews sub-forum into a private forum to help encourage more visitors to register and participate without making my entire forum private. This particular sub-forum gets a lot of page views every day and I think making it private so that visitors would have to register and request to view it would help increase forum participation. The problem is that if I make it a private forum, the users that I have authorized to view it can no longer see the new and updated threads from this sub-forum on the front page of my forum, which is in "Topics View".
It would be nice if for authorized users, the threads from a particular private sub-forum would still show up in "Topics View". This would help make privatizing a sub-forum much more transparent to the users of the forum and the topics in private sub-forums could still draw in new users to the forum with a placeholder/teaser like
"New topic posted in Forum Name. Request permission to view this topic." that could be displayed in Topics View to let non-authorized users know that they are missing out on viewing a topic. Of course, this kind of behavior in Topics View may not be desirable for all private sub-forums, so maybe this type of behavior for a private sub-forum could just be an option.
P.S. the inclusion of an
"Only registered users can view this forum" option for forums would eliminate the need to authorize a bunch of users when my goal is essentially to get more of the people that view my forum to register. But, the same argument would apply for having those topics from that "registered users only forum" appear in Topics View.
"New topic posted in Forum Name. Register to view this topic." could then be used as the placeholder/teaser.
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