One of the many handy features that vBulletin offers its users is the ability to completely control the forums. With these powerful features, you can control who can and who cannot see individual forums, or groups of forums.

Through the administration panel, you can control access to forums by each usergroup that you have enabled on your forums. You can do it by each individual forum, or you can edit by category, if you want every forum within that category to have the same access rules.

vBulletin’s allows you to drill it down as far as you want to go. The individual usergroup settings can be adjusted under the “Forums and Moderators” section, and by clicking on “Forum Permissions”.

The ability to completely control your forums is endless. You can allow guests to see the names of the threads, but when they click on it, they will be prompted to login or register, which could entice more guests to register for accounts on your forums. You can also allow users to see the forum, but no content at all, or of course you can allow them to see the forum, thread, and posts.

Have you toyed with the idea of allowing guests to post? You can, and you have the ability to set it so that posts for unregistered users (or any usergroup, for that matter) are moderated. You can enable e-mail alerts, so you are sent a copy of the proposed post. If you approve, you can enable the post with one easy click.

You can also filter out features by individual usergroup. You can allow or disallow the ability of users to send a copy via e-mail to friends, you can disable the search function by forum, you can toggle poll access, and you can choose whether or not that usergroup can reply or post.

Another powerful feature of vBulletin is the promotions feature, which will be discussed in a future post. With these two functions you can “audition” new users, and once they prove themselves in accordance with your guidelines (3 good posts, for example), vBulletin will automatically upgrade them, and grant them the new access. This comes in handy for pay forums, granting certain privileges to users once they enroll.

vBulletin makes forums administration easy, and with it, users can see as little or as much as you want them to see.

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