[btlewand]

Thanks for giving me these edits. However, I tried with just a single forum id in the two places where you would replace the 'x' and it didn't prevent me from entering the forum as an unregistered user.

I do want to mention two hacks that are on vBulletin.org which I tried and had a very unusual situation. Both hacks allow you to enter a forum based on a number of posts (so I can set the post to '1' and as long as all registered users have '1' post they can enter and the RSS feed issue is not affected. These are the two mods (I tried each individually):

https://vborg.vbsupport.ru/showthread.php?t=233979 and
https://vborg.vbsupport.ru/showthread.php?t=249977

One forum I have set up worked using either one of the above hacks separately, but I haven't been able to get a second forum on my site to work. I checked/compared the working forum with another forum set up and the configuration was the same. Then, thinking that there was something in the saved working forum template that I couldn't see, I copied the working forum and created a new forum presuming the entire configuration would copy over. That didn't work either. So both of the above hacks work but on just one forum and copying the working forum to create another did not work. Also tried disabling other plugins without success but didn't think plugins were an issue anyway since one forum was not allowing access to the unregistered usergroup and working as expected. So now I''m completely perplexed trying to troubleshoot this issue.