can we run phpBB in a "hidden" mode - not visible to the world

[apollodriver]

hello dear community,

can we run phpBB in a "hidden" mode - not visible to the world?

Or - at least hide some sub-forums ?!

That would be great!

Have a great day

[david63]

You can certainly set the phpBB permissions so that nobody accessing your site will be able to access your board other than to login. Beyond that you are probably talking about server permissions.

[KevC]

As above it's very easy to hide specific forums. There are several on here that you can't see for instance. Just set the guest group to no access.

You can hide a lot of the front page content too with either permissions or edits. You can set indexing files called robots.txt to stop the main search engines finding and indexing the site but that doesn't necessarily stop all of them.

[apollodriver]

hello dear David hello dear KevC,

first of all - many many thanks for the quick reply - great to hear from you so quickly. this supportsite here is really awesome.

You can certainly set the phpBB permissions so that nobody accessing your site will be able to access your board other than to login.
Beyond that you are probably talking about server permissions.

yes and no - server permissions (some of them could be used with .htaccess i guess)

As above it's very easy to hide specific forums. There are several on here that you can't see for instance. Just set the guest group to no access.
you can hide a lot of the front page content too with either permissions or edits. You can set indexing files called robots.txt to stop the main search engines finding and indexing the site but that doesn't necessarily stop all of them.

great thing - to hide specific forums is really a very very awesome thing. i look forward to digg deeper here.


on a sidenote: i run WordPress in several projects - and here we have a very interseting tool which is called "Restricted Site Access" - this helps me for example to hide pages
that are under construction - it is pretty easy to switch on and off the "hiding"


see here Restricted Site Access https://wordpress.org/plugins/restricted-site-access/

Limit access your site to visitors who are logged in or accessing the site from a set of specific IP addresses. Send restricted visitors to the log in page, redirect them, or display a message or page. Powerful control over redirection, including SEO friendly redirect headers. Great solution for Extranets, publicly hosted Intranets, or parallel development sites.
Limit access your site to visitors who are logged in or accessing the site from a set of specified IP addresses. Send restricted visitors to the log in page, redirect them, or display a message or page. A great solution for Extranets, publicly hosted Intranets, or parallel development / staging sites.
Adds a number of new configuration options to the Reading settings panel as well as the Network Settings panel in multisite. From these panels you can:

features:
Enable or disable site restriction
Change the restriction behavior: send to login, redirect, display a message, display a page
Add IP addresses to an unrestricted list, including ranges

dear David hello dear KevC, - keep up the great support here. It rocks and phpBB is a superb forum!!

many thanks yours Apollo

[KevC]

IP restriction won't really work. If you reboot your router you will probably get a new IP from your ISP and then you won't be able to get in.

That wordpress thing seems a bit over elaborate. You can make groups, put people in them and allow them to see or not see any forum/forums you like.

[72degrees]

On a board I maintain, a guest can only see a forum set up specifically with instructions on how to register and FAQs about registration (features an auto membership check against a completely separate database).

Never tried adding password protection by .htaccess password protection to the root phpBB directory, but it might work. Over complicated though, when as david63 says you can hide everything until logged in.

Well worth disabling 'Contact Us' too, for a quiet life. That is if you don't have the kind of user that regularly forgets how to log in or even use 'I forgot my password' (or forgot which email address they registered with)- it must be a demographic thing As a minimum turn on spambot measures. If using Q&A, change the questions regularly!