sophian wrote: ↑Thu Mar 24, 2022 7:00 pm
Basically, what I'm trying to accomplish is that I would like to be able to archive our non-profit forum and its writings that have been collected over the years into a collection that can be saved and down loaded and archived into a database and then be searchable by topic, etc... If that makes sense....
Creating the database with data is a piece of cake.
Creating the queries to retrieve data is a rather larger chunk of cake.
Creating a management system allowing viewing based on permissions ... is possible but it's a hell of a lot a work (and you need to know Access thouroughly).
With phpBB2 is was relatively easy,
With 3.0 I had a more or less functional system based on the phpBB permission system but it was static and new groups (with different permissions) required new coding.. (with Access 95).
Access is useable as long as it can be accessed only from within a private network. The moment one has possession of the physical database, all data within that database can be extracted (just search the internet for Access password retrieval), no matter how you secure it (at least up to Access 2000 - later versions I don't know).
I'll add that Access doesn't perform well in multi-user environment, and certainly not over the internet.
In short, if you offer an Access download of some sort, you need to realise that you can probably not rely on the phpBB permission system to filter data.
Your best/quickest/safest bet is to create an archive section within your board.