Private Forum Accessible by Guests.
 

Hi all,

I know this might've been answered, but trust me i have Google with many different search options, but no avail.

I created a private forum for staff members only. In permission i have disabled all other groups access except admin, mod etc. Now when i visit forum as a user i don't see that section on homepage, but when i log in as admin and go to that section it says;

Users Browsing this Forum
There are currently 8 users browsing this forum. (1 members & 7 guests)

So I need to know how these 7 are able to view this section ? How can i disable their access ?

In forum & mod settings i have used custom permissions and selected ALL NO for unregistered groups and all other groups.

Show Private forum is also set to NO

Any help will be appreciated.

Thanks.

Go to the online.php page and find the users supposedly browsing the forum and you will see they are getting a No Permission message.

Hi Lynne,

Thanks. I forgot to add this earlier and after ur suggestion i checked this again, but when i go to online.php page it doesn't show any users/guests/spiders visiting that section. Even right at this moment i checked it shows 1 member (which is myself) 4 guests, but there is nothing which is visiting that section or getting any error message.

They can't be viewing the forum if Unregistered Users cannot view the forum. I have this happen on my site all the time. If you move a thread from a public area to the private area, the spiders still remember the link and try to go to that page and will get a No Permission error.

Lynne,

unregistered users can view rest of the forum but not this one section. It's a brand new thread and only thread i made earlier in this section. I even have this option set to No.

Index New Posts in Search Engine
(Setting this to 'No' will prevent anyone from being able to search in this forum) is set to NO.

What Lynne says is still true. There simply is no way that guests would see anything but a no permission error. Spiders see exactly what you see when logged out. Chances are that some spiders picked up that forum before you made it unaccessible and now try to spider it. Perfectly normal. Believe it or not, but you won't get another explanation.

Hmmm i never said she said it wrong i was just trying to explain my situation. Yes you can be right about spider picking up forum before i made it unaccessible, but number of viewers is keep going up and down like earlier it was 2 now its 12. You think this should be normal ??

Yes, of course that's normal. Why shouldn't it? Spiders will come back randomly. That's how search engines operate.

Maybe if you gave us a link then we could tell you want we see

Hi Force,

Here is the link to my forum

Here is the direct link to that section