Read-Only Forum

Hi There,

We have used this forums to integrate into our Education website. We have implemented this some where in late 2004 or early 2005. None of those developers are working with us now.

Here is a little more information. We are Education providers and as part of it the students can discuss about their subjects in the Forums. It is all working well and fine. But Lecturers have no access to the forum.

Now, except the Forum Administrator no body has control over these forums. In my work place the Forum Administrator is basically just creates and closes the forums.

Now, there is a new requirement for us where we want to give the Lecturers Read-Only access to these forums to make sure the students are not abusing the discussion forums.

How can we acheive this ? Any help is greatly appreciated.

Thanks a lot in advance.

Version 7.96 is very old now and doesn't have the options you need built in.

If you upgrade to the latest 9.50 version it has a new permission system built in. This can be used to create a special 'lecturer' group which your lecturers could be placed in and have 'Access' only permissions to forums so they can not create topic or post.

If you download the latest free Express Edition there are database upgrade tools which can upgrade your version 7.x database to version 9.x so that it retains all your members and posts.

From version 7 to version 8 was almost a complete rewrite so all files and images would need to be replaced and any customisations would need to be redone.

You should upgrade anyway not just for the better permission system but also because allot of work was done on security and version 7.x is vulnerable to a number of exploits.

Trying to give you a break down of the security changes since version 7 would be a 10 page document and I wouldn't even know where to begin. I can tell you that over 6 months full-time work was done on making sure Web Wiz Forums was as secure as possible from many types of hacking and exploits before version 8 was released.

Trying to rewrite the code to add in the new features you require and add in the extra security coding would take months of work.

The simplest solution would be to simply upgrade your version 7.x forum to version 9.50. If you download the latest Free Express Edition it does come with database upgrade tools. You simply need to remove all the old forum files just leaving the database, upgrade the database to version 9.50 and then upload the version 9.50 files and images.