How many private areas of your site do you have and what kinds?
Besides staff, Christianity Haven has private sections for men and for women as well as a forum that we call Senior Members and that is for us to work out things with longtime active members behind closed doors so we don't air our dirty laundry to the public. We have a Member Admin Center that is private except the members can see their own threads they post as they talk to staff about issues or concerns.
I have an private board just for myself lol Where I just post my notes and whatnot. Then VIPs has there boards. members can see the boards but can't read the topics and also the topics titles.
Then the staff boards, but nothing to big and basic as to most other site's has anyway.
When I had my forums I would generally have staff, VIP and depending on how many VIPs I had I would possibly have a dedicated spam/forum games section for them with the post count off for that section.
I currently have a Staff section and a VIP member section. (Though it's called SOZ member ++, and you just need 15 good posts to request to join the group.)
On my site there's:
- the staff section (which is mostly just dry administrative stuff like lists of where I've advertised, copies of all ads, etc...)
- the roleplay section... which isn't so much private as it is members only now. So guests can't see it, but that's pretty much it. When we changed from a roleplay site to a gaming site it's importance kind dropped so no need to showcase it anymore.
- a section for member to showcase their creative works. Visible to members only so guests can't pilfer and go.
- a real life section where people can chat about stuff going on off the screen. It's also members only and comes with the understanding anything posted there is never to be mentioned anywhere else.
Aside from the staff section they're all open to members. So... only the staff section is truly private then.
On my own personal forums, I've contemplated various types of private forums, but never really did much with them. The only private forums I really use now for my own forums, is just for moderation discussion and spam archives.
On my forum, I have a private section for just staff. I call it the "staff lounge". Staff members can discuss things regarding the community in that section, plus, the trash bin is located in there where all the archived topics are sent to. Also, I have a private section for just the VIP's.
We have admin and mod areas and a trash forum that are hidden. One for our content creators as well where they could help each other with ideas and editing. Also a hidden forum for our donators. Then, our Current Events section is members only. That was a necessary move because now we can remove problem users from that section without banning them altogether. There have been a couple of people that we had to do it to because they would cause a lot of issues in political threads. I felt that is was important to remove offsite visibility so they couldn't still read those threads and get all uppity.
