Private Forum/ Intranet

I've had a project "on ice" for the last couple of years - basically meaning I haven't been bothered to sort it out or found it too time consuming to do...

There's a group of locals, around 20 or so people, who regularly communicate via email and could potentially do with a "private" forum or an intranet/ extranet arrangement... it doesn't matter who sees it, on the WWW, as long as the integrity of the group is maintained to a certain degree...

Being a local (North East Hampshire/ West Surrey, UK) group it would be great to attract International comment and feedback (web traffic) but more appropriate to restrict the membership/ activities of the group to the local posse... (10/20 mile radius)

Blogger with "Team Members" has been considered, as has use of WordPress, PHPBB2 or VBulletin....

Anyone had any similar experiences and care to share or recommend?

Your help, as ever, greatly appreciated LD

 

Keep it a closed forum, requires registration, and moderate registrations. That way the group won't be rudly interupted.

That's all I got.

 

That is why you moderate registrations. If you don't have time, it's hard to complain. Forums need attention.

 

noppid: Thanks noppid You still getting traffic and searches though? If it's OK to ask, what BB you using? Or is that all u got How did you manage to do a limited/ restricted/ private forum and still clearly turn away Joe Public?

Smyrl: Thanks Shannon... I noticed a couple of great features in forum software to filter the unwelcome/unexpected, and have the same limitations in admin time as your good self

 

I'd be more then happy to give more input. Talking about the controls available is easy. Try to talk about how to use um, you'll get an opinion for each participant.

If you close the forum completely, meaning guests can't view, you'd need to have a few html pages up front I would think, all guests and bots will see are no permission screens.

You can open it up for view and only allow posts for members. Maybe even only show one or two forums in public just to keep the bots happy and let folks get an idea what the place is about.

Either way, you should probably moderate new registrations and set a few profile fields to mandatory so ya can get an idea about the person joining. This will prevent spammers and make trollers have time to cool off and probably go away before approval.

Once they are in, it would be a staff job to mind the member I guess. Like the stuff ya see going on around here or any forum.

Be more specific, I'm home with kids on a no school night. I'm burning time. Can't really code with so much distraction.