Reply-Only Forums

[Migrated From Jforum.net]

Is there a way to create a forum that will only allow administrators to post new topics but allow any user to view and reply to those existing topics? For example, I'm thinking about an "announcements" type forum where I can post information about new releases of a product and users can ask questions or comment on my posts but cannot create new topics of their own?
[originally posted on jforum.net by nawilson]

[Migrated From Jforum.net]

Yes. Go to the Administration Panel, choose "Groups" from the left menu and then click in the "Permissions" link of the "General" group. Now there is an option named "Read-Only Forums".. Just choose the forums you want to disallow posting for regular users.

Doing that, you should go to "Users" and then click in "Permissions" for the user you want to allow posting to the forum - considering, of course, that the user is in the same "General" ( or the group you edited before ) group. You'll see that in the "Read-Only Forums" the forums you previously choosed in the Group Permission Control are selected. That's because users inherits permissions from its groups.

So, now, just unselect the forum ( or forums ) you want to allow this user to have posting rights ( or just "Allow All" to allow him to post to all forums ).

That's all.

Rafael
[originally posted on jforum.net by Rafael Steil]

[Migrated From Jforum.net]

Thanks for the reply, but I don't think that's exactly what I was asking. It seems like the steps that you provided would simply allow a certain subset of users to have different rights than the group he is in, but in this case that user woul d have the ability to both post new topics and reply to existing topics, whereas I just want them to have the ability to reply to existing topics but not post new ones. That is, the "New Topic" button would not be displayed for this user in that forum, but the "post reply" button would.

Here's another example where I think this could be useful. Consider the case of an open source project in which there is a forum that is used to provide information about every commit performed in CVS. Since the CVS tree is only writeable for a small number of users, I would put those users in one group and give them the ability to post new topics in that forum. However, I would like all other users to be able to see information about those commits and post replies to existing ones (e.g., to point out mistakes or suggest an alternate implementation), but they couldn't post their own new topics.
[originally posted on jforum.net by nawilson]

[Migrated From Jforum.net]

Oh, I see ( sorry, I didn't read your message comletely before ).. so then, currently it is not possible to do this kind of action. I'll try to include it in 1.0.

Rafael
[originally posted on jforum.net by Rafael Steil]