Hello. I am an instructor that will be teaching a hybrid course (half in-class, half online). I would like to set up a message board for my students to use to ask questions and whatnot.

I want to know if there is a way for me to preassign students a login and password to the forums I create and only allow these students be able to post to my forums? That is, I don't want anyone else to be able to make an account and to start posting.

Please let me know as your forums look great!

Thanks for your help.

Hello Mike,

most probably you would need to set the option

$enableNewRegistrations=FALSE;

of setup_options.php which prevents new registrations.

However being logged as admin you can still sign up an account for certain user and whatever you need to use is the link which will look like

http://here_goes_your_URL/index.php?action=registernew

You can paste this link in the free HTML from under templates/admin_panel.html template so it would be comfortable to go to it next time when you need register a user... or just put it in your browser's Bookmarks. It's up to you.

Thanks for the quick reply. I was thinking that I could also have students self-register and I could then approve those registrations on the admin side of things.

Is that also possible?

Is that also possible?

Yes - via Premoderation addon

Please refer to this thread, there is a free solution:

Administrator approving new users?

;-)

Hello,
I know that Admin can grant access to certain sub-forums to a closed list of users. However, I need something opposite: grant access to a sub-forum anybody but certain users. Is there any standard feature or a solution in mini-BB to realize it?

Thank you for response!

Sincerely,
Roman.

The standard feature is not present of such way, however you can emulate it using existing miniBB options. So the solution is possible.

And how I can emulate it using existing mini-BB options?

Do I need a function which returns the complete set of current user IDs, except certain defined, for it?

It's a professional question and is up to your imagination and our working rates ;)

Thank you! My imagination suggests me to move to some really free and configurable BB-family engine with neither hidden smiles nor hidden charges.

It's not up to hidden charge, it's about custom coding (for your custom task).