Question Threads from Private Boards showing up in Forum Tab

Running Joomla 1.5.14, CB 1.2.1, and Kunena 1.5.4...

In Kunena I have 4 forums set up that are only viewable by the staff. The problem I'm running into is that anytime my staff or I post something in one of those forums, the title and forum associated with the post shows up in the "Forums" tab and is viewable by everyone.

Is there a way to set it so that the posts from those private boards don't show up in the "Forum Posts" section of the "Forums" tab? I basically want to set it up so no one can see those posts through that tab.

standarddamage wrote:

In Kunena I have 4 forums set up that are only viewable by the staff. The problem I'm running into is that anytime my staff or I post something in one of those forums, the title and forum associated with the post shows up in the "Forums" tab and is viewable by everyone.

I assume, when you write "everyone", you mean only registered, logged-in users who have access to the member profiles. Is that correct?

If what you say is correct, this seems to be a bad security flaw in Community Builder. What do the folks at Joomlapolis have to say about this problem? This means you cannot keep any of your forums private! :ohmy:

If your first priority is to stop unauthorised people using a back-door approach to view restricted forums, you must unpublish the CB forum tab now ... at least until the folks at Joomlapolis have provided you with a solution.

sozzled wrote:

I assume, when you write "everyone", you mean only registered, logged-in users who have access to the member profiles. Is that correct?

Yes. Exactly.

If what you say is correct, this seems to be a bad security flaw in Community Builder. What do the folks at Joomlapolis have to say about this problem? This means you cannot keep any of your forums private! :ohmy:

They're actually my next stop. I wanted to make sure that there wasn't something I was doing wrong from the Kunena end, especially seeing as I'm so new to the software.

If your first priority is to stop unauthorised people using a back-door approach to view restricted forums, you must unpublish the CB forum tab now ... at least until the folks at Joomlapolis have provided you with a solution.

The problem is that if I disable that tab, the members won't be able to change their signatures. However, I can set the number of posts to 0 so that none of the posts show up at all for anyone under that tab. Which is probably what I'll end up doing before I open the new Kunena forums.

Thanks for the response, Sozzled, I appreciate it.

You can also unpublish the forumview field in the forum tab of community builder.

standarddamage wrote:

The problem is that if I disable that tab, the members won't be able to change their signatures. However, I can set the number of posts to 0 so that none of the posts show up at all for anyone under that tab. Which is probably what I'll end up doing before I open the new Kunena forums.

There are other alternatives, too, and I would investigate the suggestion made by Hurr1c4n3:

You can also unpublish the forumview field in the forum tab of community builder.

I rely on Community Builder for user registration, login and for users to choose/upload an avatar. The tabs on the user profiles are useful but they're non-essential and, particularly in your case, one of them creates a significant problem in terms of allowing unauthorised access to confidential and/or sensitive information. That, in my opinion, is an unpardonable sin and demands an immediate solution.

For your information, I have set the two relevant Kunena configuration settings thus:

Integration » Avatar Integration » Use avatar picture from = Community Builder
Integration » Profile Settings » Profile = Kunena

With these settings, my users can change their signatures from the Kunena user panel.

Keep us posted on what information you obtain from Joomlapolis.

Hurr1c4n3 wrote:

You can also unpublish the forumview field in the forum tab of community builder.

To my understanding, you can't. It's a system-generated field.

Keep us posted on what information you obtain from Joomlapolis.

I will Sozzled. No answer as of yet.

The thing is that all they would need to do is allow you to pick and choose which forums to publish, which I surprised they overlooked seeing as both Kunena and JFusion allow for that very option in the profiles and modules.

The forum tab has a lot of issues that I hope CB is aware of. If not, I intend to make them aware of them so they can be fixed. There's this, and CB 1.2.1 doesn't recognize the ranks properly either.

Again, thanks for the help, Sozzled.