I would like to make all the forums a "read only" and disable the posting new and replying options. This is all possible through the control panel.
Then put any messages say older than 6 months - year onto a cd. Then prune the board to delete anything older than those dates. Anyone that wanted to search through "archived" posts would be able to if they had a copy of the cd.
I have Microweb, and the files are where they are suppose to be on the cd. So it does sound like a permission problem. There should be something that can be put in the code to make it either not check the permissions, or tell it that they are read only. But, I have no clue as to what that would be.
Daren