Hey, I am always around I average 1.72 posts / day how could you miss me?! If I am not posting I am probably fighting off spammers, adding new RSS feeds, checking out new features or working on things like trying to finally get our domain transferred. And funny you should mention this topic about having a team only forum area as we have recently been discussing this admin side since we know this has been a desire of the team.
So... this seems like a good as place as any to propose to you what we had in mind.
First the problem statement: Who gets access, by what criteria, and what happens when someone doesn't meet that criteria anymore once they are "in"? Also this access criteria needs to be applied fairly and the same be you a big stoner or small. Lastly the overhead of applying said criteria and maintaining access cannot consume all of the admin time allocated to the board.
So, what has been clanging around inside our diabolical pea sized admin skulls regarding this topic?
1. Setup a team only forum area: keep the number of boards in that area fairly small like say two : Team Strategy, Project Strategy so private team info goes in the team area and private project info goes in the project area. The thought here is to not have a lot of duplicate posts, if it doesn't need to be in private area then post it out in the correct area in the public forum.
2. Access is granted by request (moderation): I think we can setup additional members that can help with this process to review and approve access.
3. The criteria: K.I.S.S - the one stop record of truth shall be free-dc:
Who is a member of SETI.USA?. When someone requests access to the forum they provide their CPID and that is what is used to determine their status. Can people defeat our state of the art security measures and gain access? yea... but so what, think of it as going from totally open to semi-private.
Discuss please.