The Discus Professional software allows the board administrator and moderators to set permissions for reading of a topic, in addition to posting to the topic. This allows you to password-protect your topics to limit access to board members. Or, using IP restrictions, you can make a topic readable from only certain machines. And, of course, you can combine these settings.

The ability to password-protect the reading of topics is available only in Discus Professional. If you desire this feature, will need to purchase Discus Professional.

1. Log in to the administration program as the board administrator, or a moderator with editing privileges in the topic you wish to restrict. Go to Access Manager and click on the topic whose privileges you wish to change.

2. In the reading privileges section, change the permissions from "Public" to something else, according to your needs. For complete explanations of the available options, consult the administration instructions for the version of Discus Professional that you are using.

It is possible, using the server's access control features, to prevent people from accessing certain directories without being authenticated to the server. Note, however, that this does not prevent someone from using the search scripts, tree view, etc., to view content from areas that you choose to restrict.

When access control is needed, the only solution supported by DiscusWare is to use the Access Manager to set privileges, as described in this document.