The features described below are still in testing and are not available to all users. But if you need to use any of them, then please contact Admin, and we'll see what we can do about enabling them for your account.

For Section Managers

Sections now have access control lists. An access control list is a list of users who are either allowed to or prohibited from posting inside the section.

This allows for two possible ways of managing a section.

It can be an open section, where everyone is allowed to post, except for the specific users who are explicitly denied.

Or an invite-only section, where nobody is allowed to post, except for the users who are explicitly allowed.

The first way is appropriate for situations when you need to ban a specific user from your section.

The second way is to deal with trolling by people who create new user accounts. When you deny everyone except for explicitly allowed users, you effectively prevent anyone from creating new accounts just to troll in your section. So that might be a good solution. But keep in mind that an invite-only section is a major inconvenience for other users who are not on your list. They would be unable to participate in your section until you explicitly add them to the list.

So please think twice before requesting an invite-only section, because that might cost you some lost users.

The same mechanism is also available for individual topics. So it's possible to prevent specific users from posting in a given topic, or even make a topic invite-only.

If you need this functionality, then please contact Admin.

For Users Who Started Long-Running Topics

It you started a topic, and it reached hundreds of pages and was split up several times, and now you have a sort of following consisting of the users who participate in that topic in an ongoing manner, and someone is disrupting the topic, then we can turn that topic into an invite-only topic.

This is done by a similar mechanism as described above. With the difference being that you would be the one managing the access control list of the topic.

If you need this enabled for one of your topics, then please contact Admin.But please keep in mind, we can only do that for long-running topics which have effectively turned into their own hangout places for a group of established users.