Ok, you're setting up your forums or you're adding a couple of new forums to your existing site. You don't want them to be publicly available or you want to add a couple of initial post before you let the great unwashed get their hands on them.

But as soon as you click 'Create new forum' button your forum goes public and your eager public go 'Ooh! a new forum, lets see what it's all about!'

Yes, you can set it as locked but then it can still be read.

Anyway, to cut a long story short...

to make your forums Private (ADMIN only) by default,
in admin/admin_forums.php

find



replace with



And there you have it.

Even though that script is nice and will work why would you use it, unless you have about 30,000 users and many of them are quite fast a typing or just so happen to be on the Index of your forums, all you have to do after creating a forum is go to forum permissions and within 15 seconds you can make all permissions admin only without messing with the code. and to be even quicker just go to the forum permisssions and set view to admin only with just three clicks total and it's a done deal.

I think there's a mod that does this, but this is much more simple, or at least I'm going to guess because I haven't actually ever installed the mod, but it's right here