what's the best way to turn off certain private forums from being viewed altogether regardless of usergroup permissions ?

Wow fancty seeing you here eva :)

- miSt

George, you have 2 choices. Either add your forum info onto the robots.txt file (easiest way):
[high]Disallow: /forum/forumdisplay/f-32.html[/high]
Or change this onto your forumdisplay.txt (or archive.txt) file:
To:EDIT: what's the archive URL? so I add it in the first post...

awesome works great http://animeboards.com/archive/?styleid=18 :)

There is something wrong there with your style, you are supposed to have an arrow in front of each forum...
Right click on the little arrow, on my archive to see the location...
What is your $bburl set at? It looks like it doesn't see the {imagesfolder} replacement variable.
Let me know please.

Also, remove the link to the forums front page, it was done in purpose this way (quote from first post):

all i had to do was upload arrow.gif to each styles image directories :)

Ok, now remove the link to the forums home page in the header. :p

from what i understand, some search engines if they don't find a link back to the main site, might think it was spammed

but either way my whole forum is spider friendly via mod_rewrite, so doesn't matter which way they spider :D

Hmm really? That's interesting, where did you read this George?
Let me know please...

I added your link to the first post. :)

i read it at http://searchengineforums.com/ - use to be a frequent member there :D