Making forum categories available for viewing only
I am setting up a forum that has a whole set of categories (imported from an old forum) that I want to keep around for historical purposes, but would like to close off from further participation. This is obviously an unusual use of the forum, but I wonder if you all who know Vanilla Forums much better than I might have some suggestions about various techniques for achieving this, existing tools/plugins, etc that may help. The problem is of course partly technical and partly a design problem. The technical side is what I'm asking about here. I want these old forums to be closed off for further commenting. Ideally they'd also be separated out in terms of search functions. I.e. so that a search of the forum, would not pull data from the historical forums, or better yet that I could somehow give the user an option about whether they are searching the historical forums or not.
Any ideas?
Comments
You can pretty easily restrict the categories to be read only via the custom permissions. Remove everything but the view permissions.
In terms of searching, I don't think there is an existing way to do this. IIRC, there is an archive functionality that might prevent the search from happening. I don't remember. Assuming the old date is not enough, you could create a parent category for the archived discussions.
Go in the dashboard and look at the categories. You can set individual permissions per category (remove Add permission). No need for plugins
Thank you @hgtonight and @R_J. These are helpful suggestions.
Oh, @hgtonight was first again