[Kane@airrifle]

Originally Posted by RichieBoy67

You can only hide the content that way. Everyone can still see the forum. Anyways, Dave figured it out for me. I had everything right but he added an empty if statement. Genius. I was pulling my hair out.

In the forum permissions manager you can set zero access to everything for any user group. Works perfectly well on my 4.2.5 forums.

If you are paranoid about links from private forums being shared on other platforms you can also make a redirect plugin to replace the standard "no permission" message a non credentialed user may receive.

EG:
Hook: error_fetch
Title: Redirect Private Threads
Code:

if (!isset($vbulletin->userinfo['userid']) OR $vbulletin->userinfo['userid'] == 0)
    {
    $vbulletin->url = 'https://www.whateverpageyouwantotredirectto.com/';
    eval(print_standard_redirect('no permission')); 
}