Question Hide BBCode [URL] for non registered users

I've merged a few discussion topics all relating to this subject so that you can see what other people have suggested.

Why does my post link to this? This has nothing to do with my question...I know I can hide it via post. But is it possible to hide it via back end or mod. For example, I click "Guest Can View Forums". Then guests cannot view the forums. Is there such a mod or hack that I can use that does it for all posts? Without the hassle of doing it to every post.

360236 wrote:

I am asking if there is something that can make it so if a Guest visits my website, and if they click on any post it will say "Please login to view this post" or "Please login to view this link".

So, are you saying that you don't want to hide (that is make invisible) these unspecified links. You just want to somehow "deactivate" them? Hey, I'm just replying to what you wrote, that's all. :S

I've thought about your question some more: perhaps what you're asking is "Can I display a list of the topics on my forum, but not allow users to see what's been posted in those topics?" Is that really your question?

Yes, did my question not sound like that?

No, your question did not sound anything like that.

Anyway, the answer is that you can't do this without modifying the code; there are (at least) two files that need to be changed to include a test to see if the person viewing the topic is logged-in or not. If the person is not a user, then don't generate the hyperlink.

This will result in another problem, however: how you prevent users guessing the URLs of your half-and-half restricted topics. Eventually these guests will figure out how to access the restricted-but-unrestricted messages directly. You won't be able to outsmart these types without adding some ACL protection that doesn't exist in Joomla 1.5.

Personally, I think we're over-engineering a solution to a non-problem. The easiest way out of this intellectual quagmire is to restrict certain categories to registered, logged-in users (this is what most people do) but that also means that those categories and the topics in them are hidden from guests.

Not easy to solve but at least we've clarified the question.