time-based access to posts

[offlead]

I'm looking for a way to have time-based access to posts. The situation is one with free general registration for forum access, and then paid subscriptions that gives certain privileges.

One of those privileges is that we'd like paid subscribers to have immediate access to all new threads in certain categories. But after a certain amount of time -- 2 weeks for example -- a thread would become accessible to the general public. So non-paying members eventually can see all content, they just can't see it immediately unless they are paying subscribers.

I am looking for a solution that does not involve separating things into separate forums, one for paid and one for unpaid members. I know we could move a thread from the subscriber-access forum to the public-access forum after three weeks, but A) we don't want admins to have to physically move threads to make them public -- too much hassle and too much time involved; and B) this would then essentially break up content into two forums for the subscribers, who would have to go to the paid forums to see new threads, and to the public forums to continue following older threads. This is a setup that would cover varying amounts of content (threads) spread between many dozens of forums over a number of categories, so doubling the number of forums to accomplish this would be very unwieldy.

I'd love to hear some suggestions...thanks!

[offlead]

Still hoping someone might have some idea(s) on where I could start for something like this. It's been a long while since I did much customization of vB, and I'm both out of practice and not overly familiar with the latest versions. I'm not looking for someone to do this for me, only for some shoving in the right direction.