Filtering out forums from search results

[Casparian]

Hi all
our forums have a "Chat Chat"/Off topic section where people can socialise. A vocal minority dislike this, it gets in the way of their "serious" discussions, so they want a way to filter it out.

There have been various options mooted, but the most popular (and most logical, I feel) is to simply have two "New Posts" pages, one which displays everything EXCEPT the OT forums, and one which ONLY shows the OT forums. This way, those who wish to be anti-social only see the serious chat in New Posts and in searches, and those who want to want to get to know other members can delve into the OT new posts page.

I'm thinking it'd just require a change to the search.php page, creating two versions of it - one which filters out the OT forum IDs and one that filters out the non-OT forum IDs.

Has anyone done anything similar, or are there any mods which can do anything like this?

Many thanks

Casp
http://www.pagan-network.org/forums/