Forum -setting up & security & closing early ?

Cat72

Hi
Im wondering if some of you experts can help. We are going to be setting up a forum for children for our charity.
The problem being safety .
I had suggestes one thing was to close the forums early to prevent kids posting at night. By this I mean the forums would be open, so people could read them but that no posts could be put on till morning.
Does anyone know how this is done as I presumend it would be a program issue ? If you could help that would be great as IM getting heavily opposed by people who dont understand.
Next does anyone have ideas of any programs etc we could build in to make the forums safer & only accessable for kids ?
I would be so grateful if you could help in anyway .
Many thanks :T

iviv

Assuming you're going to be looking for free forum software, and have web hosting set up, try phpBB.

As for the time lock problem, you can close the forum manually, but I'm not sure about another way. phpBB has a very active modding community, releasing all kinds of mods to do different things. Try registering on the official forum and posting in the Requests forum. You may want to do a quick forum search first though, I can't as I'm not a member.

Cat72

Many thanks for your reply & help.That site seems really good and we might use it for our template. The only prob is that unfortunately we would need monitors to have disclosures etc so we would need to know them on a personal basis.
If there are any other ideas about how to add safety programs into the site that would be great.

TechTerry

An admin or a staff member can close the boards each night, or you could ask for a mod to be made.

fwor

PunBB and SMF also both get good reviews.

In the end your choice is likely to be determined by which one has plugins that best suit your needs - such as your requirement for a scheduler to control when it can be accessed.

samhale

I'm not amazingly sure what you need here-
If you use PHPBB, than if you make it so you have to register, and the admin confirms registrations before you can post, only authorised users can post, and so if anyone joins up with intent to spam at night, they wont be able to do so until the admin is online, and so can remove offending posts.
Otherwise I'm sure there is a mod where all posts need to be verified before apeparing to the public.
Either way, if you need some help don't hesistate to PM me.