personal or privately maintained forums/subforums

[stardotstar]

Hi all,

I have done a bit of searching but seen nothing standing out so far.

What I have a need for is a kind of personal or private forum within the forum structure that is maintained and password protected by the member who owns it.

I have a competition submission category and forum in which challenges are set and people are encouraged to post responses by a certain date.

Formatting and layout and general editing becomes a bit time consuming so I want people to be able to build their submission as a thread or post somewhere on the boards that is effectively private (even from admins unless they specifically need to violate it - like PMs)

I note the password system for securing Private Forums but that means that the admin still sets the password.

I can think of ways of doing this by allowing moderators to change passwords and then setting the forum to a single group and make the member the moderator or something like that ?// is that how it would be accomplished in the standard system?

Is it done with social groups?

Anyway I am thinking this kind of structure:

->Challenges Category
--> Challenge Type 1 Forum
--> Challenge Type 2 Forum
--> Challenge Tyne n Forum
-> General Category
--> General Discussions Forum
--> Admin and Member Service Forum
-> Private Forums Category
--> Member X Forum
--> Member Y Forum
--> Member n Forum

In the Private forums category forums are created by admin and then the user is assigned to it and prompted for a password to set and then only they can see it - and Admin can only see it if they use Admin power to change the password and use that password to go in... That sounds ok?

TIA for suggestions guys,
Will

[edit] BTW I know that phpBB now provides for a "save" so that posts can be built/edited and tuned etc before "submitting..." this is another way to skin this particular problem in a way but not quite the same as having a true "space" for personal use.[/edit]