I have a few forums that are for members only but would like the forum title and description visible to everyone. If a guest clicks on the forum I would like them to be denied access and receive a message that they must be a member to view the post in this forum.

I was hoping that there is a simple way to do this and you folks could give me direction on how to accomplish this.

There's not an automatic way to do that.

But it can be done.

What you basically need to do is make a "teaser forum".
The members see the real forum.... and those that can't see a "teaser forum".

That way they know something is there.

I've written more and a detailed "how-to" here in our how-to help library.

Hope it helps.

Thanks for the answer I was looking for Josh. my question has been answered, but creates another. When I create the teaser forum how can it show post activity? I mean, the post count will show 1 all the time as members will not be posting in the teaser forum.

During the writing and reading of this post I also noticed if I logged out and viewed this post, I could not access the link you had posted. Nice touch.

You are right about the post count and such. Indeed that really can't be done easily. It probably could be done with some major hacking.

You could probably do SQL Queries periodically to update those counts on the main page.

I guess a script could be written to get the post count of xxxx forum and update the Board total for the xxxxteaser forum. You could run this nightly with a cron job. <shrug>
I'm thinking out loud. (Which sometimes gets me in trouble.)

Really it's purpose is to let people know that there is something there that they don't see. If they see nothing, they don't know what they are missing.

Depending on what the forum is about... the admin could post "teaser" posts in there... giving people a sample of what they are missing.

As per limiting access to those logged in... yes, that's as simple as giving "no access" to the guest group. That way we aren't giving all our library here away without them at least signing up for a "library card" first.

Well, sounds like a lot of work required to update a post count and doesn't add enough value to the teaser forum in my opinion. As you said the teaser is only a sampling at most of what registration includes.

Thanks for the info. I will implement a teaser forum and word carefully my post in attempt to lure the lurkers into membership and conversation.

Thanks