How Can I Create Cloaked Forums With Phpbb?

[Beston's NHB]

I need a private message board that will be accessed only by a few people and I need to make sure it won't be spidered by search engines because I don't want it to be "discovered" by anyone. Is there a way to create a forum that can only be seen by people I invite? Maybe a hack I can install? Thanks!

[TCH-Don]

Just install the forum in a folder

and do not link to it on your site.

Then e-mail the link in the invitation.

[LisaJill]

You are going to use PHPBB? If so, login to the Administrative area and click on forum permissions. There you choose who can see it and post to it. =)

 

In my experience the best thing to do is set up a group and after people register, assign the ones that you want to see that private forum to that group, and give that group access to the forum. That's how I've done it in the past.

 

Let me know if that helps. =)

[TCH-Bruce]

And create a robots.txt file for your site if you don't already have one and add a line similar to this:

 

Disallow: /forum/

 

This will stop most robots from spidering your forum.

[Beston's NHB]

Thanks, guys! I appreciate the responses very much.

 

You are going to use PHPBB?  If so, login to the Administrative area and click on forum permissions.  There you choose who can see it and post to it. =)

 

In my experience the best thing to do is set up a group and after people register, assign the ones that you want to see that private forum to that group, and give that group access to the forum.  That's how I've done it in the past.

 

Let me know if that helps. =)

Lisa, I didn't see the options you mentioned when I was in the admin area, but I'll look again. I was probably so frustrated that I overlooked it.

 

Bruce, I'm not familiar with robots.txt files. Do I just write

 

Disallow: /forum/

 

on a blank page, save it as robots.txt and upload it to public_html and that's it?

 

Sorry for the dumb questions, but even though I've been making websites for over six years, I haven't improved much since the beginning.

[LisaJill]

Beston - my solution is if you have a message board where you just want to hide a few forums. If you don't want the message board visible at all you should look at the other solutions. =)

 

Here is a tutorial about robots.txt. Hope that helps =)

[TCH-Bruce]

And here is another robots.txt resource.

 

http://www.robotstxt.org/wc/robots.html