Displayin' a Forum only at a specific Time

[oxy]

After asking the Question on vbulletin-germany.com and on vbulletin.com, i've received an advice to post the question here.

So, we want to add a new Forum to our vB which is called something like "Friends of the Night". This Forum - as it goes by name - should only be displayed at night (lets say 1 to 6 H a.m.) for normal "registered Users". But User-Groups like Moderators, Super-Moderators and Administrator should be able to see that Forum all the day.

I've already found out that the whole vBulletin can be disabled by Cron-Job at a specific time with this command/cron:

UPDATE datastore SET data = REPLACE(data, 'bbactive";s:1:"1"', 'bbactive";s:1:"0"') WHERE title = 'options'

and be enabled again by this:

UPDATE datastore SET data = REPLACE(data, 'bbactive";s:1:"0"', 'bbactive";s:1:"1"') WHERE title = 'options'

Is there any possibility to do the same thing with one single forum, without installing/requesting a hack?

i would be very, very glad if someone could help me out with this...

greets,
oxy

[Paul M]

There is no way you could do this for specific forums without a hack. Also, if you close the whole forum as above then only Administrators can access it (not mods).

[amykhar]

A cron script could do this easily for you. All you would need to do is to set the display order to 0 when you want it off and then reset the display order to what it's supposed to be when it's on.

By using a cron script, you most likely won't have to redo the hack every time you upgrade your forums.