Question Making forums read-only

Hi,

How can you make the forums read-only to all people and not just super admins?

" Set to "Yes" if you want to take the Forum section offline. The Forum will still remain browseable by site (super)admins."

Thanks,
Otips

Hi,

I am not sure I understand your question.

The feature you mention is to take the forum offline - similar to taking the site offline in Joomla config. Its when you want to hide all of the forum during maintenance. Once you do that only admins will be able to see it. This is so you can test whatever maintenance you are performing. All other users will be locked out.

This has nothing todo with making forums or categories read-only. If you want to do that simply define the category or categories of choice as read only in the category manager.

Hope this helps!

Hi Fxstein,

Thanks for your response. We operate www.turn2me.org , a mental health forum, our problem is that we want to be able to make the entire board read-only from midnight until 9am, given the type of forum we are. We may get calls for help posted.

We do not have a developer on hand and no budget being a charity, I want to manually do this in the back-end just so that members cannot post at night when we have no moderators online.

Many members just like to read the over 16k posts we have.

Hope you can further help me.

Thanks,
Oisin

Perhaps there are certain internet-based forums that operate only on a "nine-to-five" basis as far as allowing users to post messages is concerned. May I as, "given the type of forum that you are", do you have a forum "answering service" where people can leave messages for someone to call them back, say, for users who keeps different hours to yours?

I really don't understand the idea of locking an internet-based forum because the "office manager" happens to be away from their desk but I respect that it's your forum and you have the right to make the rules. I would guess though, given the particular subject matter, you want to keep a close watch on what is posted to your forum.

It's possible to develop a cron job lock the forum categories (allow only moderators and administrators to post messages but, otherwise, messages can be read by anyone) between certain hours ... but that's something for a talented coder to build.

I think a better idea would be to set up your categories as "review posts = yes" which means that your moderators have to approve all messages before they appear visible to other users. What do you think of that idea?

Thanks for your reponse, I appreciate it.

It is not a case of close the forum when the "office manager goes home", the purpose of this modifacation is to make the forum read-only when a moderator is not logged in, this is typically after 12 at night. This measure is damage limitation given that people may post suicide posts at night, having no mod on the board could be dangerous to at least advise them what to do.

Thanks,

Hi,

Can you please help with the below?

The Cron Job method would work if the Kunena component saved its
configuration in a config file.
It doesn't. It saves config changes in the database.

Thanks.

I honestly think the best way to deal with the matters discussed in this topic is for the user to make all writeable categories "Review posts = Yes". In this way, messages will be seen by moderators (and have to be approved by moderators) before they appear on the forum.

There's no need to make some categories "read-only" according to certain times of the day. There's no need to make your forum a "nine-to-five" operation.

If your categories are configured so that new messages have to be approved before they appear on the forum then you won't encounter the sensitive issues that you've mentioned. The overnight "psychologically traumatic" messages will be waiting for the moderator first thing in the morning - like a kind of answering machine system - ready for the appropriate kind of attention/action. During the day, as new messages arrive, moderators can screen them before they appear on the discussion board. It's simple; it's easy-to-manage; it's effective.

I don't usually want to post SQL into our forum, but I made exception this time, as the question was very interesting.

You can change database tables in cron job. Here's the idea how you do it:

WARNING: Do not try to do this if you don't know what you are doing. I only posted the idea how to do it, so there's no way to get it to work without good knowledge on Cron Jobs (and MySQL).

offline.sql:
online.sql:
Offline script in Linux/Unix (does not work without modifying user, password and path to the file):
Online script in Linux/Unix (does not work without modifying user, password and path to the file):

Yes, that's an interesting idea, Matias. If I understand you correctly, this idea would result in taking the forum offline. If the forum is offline, ordinary users cannot use the forum to read any of the messages.

As I understand the user's request, the forum needs to operator to let users to read messages 24 hours a day but to prevent postings during certain times when there's no moderator on duty.

My suggestion is to make all categories "Review Posts = Yes" which basically means that all categories can be read any time but new messages will not appear on the forum until the moderators have reviewed and approved them. This, in my opinion, provides the best solution.

Hi Guys,

Thanks for your response. Our developer has scheduled a cron job that marks the forums at midnight set review posts = yes, which in turn then deactivates at 9am.

Cheers,
O