[cellarius]

If he has no clue about coding for vB, our instructions will probably not be much help, either. It is highly adivsable to follow vB procedures when coding addons.

You could tell him to make a plugin that creates a unique hash when a thread is created and save it into a new field of the thread table. You need that hash because it is terribly easy to guess threadids, and that's all you need to access a thread via URL.

Next, he'd have to get that hash into the link that is being sent to the user, which would probably be in the showthread template. Of course, you need to make sure it's only present in forums where you want to use this.

Then tell him to create another plugin that changes the forum permission on the fly when that hash is present as an URL parameter (I have not tried whether that is possible or not; this may be the hardest part). Of course, you will have to make sure that the hash is passed across pages in multi-page threads, which may prove to be not trivial. Maybe it's possible to manipulate the posts per page setting on the fly, too, so you could push it up to, like, 500, to make sure all posts in a thread are being shown on one page. Again - this plugin needs to be active only for forums you actually want to use this, and checks need to be in place this can't be used to get around permissions for other restricted forums.

If you can't adequately change the forum permissions on the fly, you'd have to create a seperate page that shows the thread to the user, not implementing vB permissions and getting the data from the table yourself. If your programmer knows what he's doing, he could probably use the existing postbit templates.

That's all I can think of from the top of my head, and yes, for a programmer that has never worked with vB there are lots of pits to fall into.