Your question was addressed to podrock, and that’s proper: He’s system admin, and it’s up to him whether to admit more people into that circle. Also, the upcoming access control system will introduce a new role to be called something like “nodemaster”, which has broad admin powers but limited to a single node (forum). In the future that would let podrock delegate administration of specific forums.

Then there’s the more technical side. If you’re into PHP and LAMP, I might have some work on the software to farm out. Depends on what you know or are willing to learn about WordPress.

I appreciate the offer.

But help is on the way. In the latest version of the software, just finishing its shakedown cruise, I added a hack to selectively broaden that access to various roles, e.g. Authors and Editors, on a per-node basis.

Bottom line, the next upgrade will let you set boards to public or private.

Oh, you want an ETA? This coming week, I think. I have to install it on a second university site first.

Any way I can help?

We’ll have to wait on that. However, individual posts (that start a thread) can be made private / password protected. Haven’t played with that yet.