The most important password?

Perhaps the most important password is your own password--that is, the password you use to login and configure your forum. Make sure your password is a good one. It is best for it to have some letters and numbers in it. This makes things more secure. Try to prevent from using regular words, or anything guessable (like your name or pets name), or simple passwords like 'aaaaa'.

Passwords for users (read and write)

When choosing passwords for users to access your forum, you can require passwords for reading the forum and for writing the forum. If a user does not have a read password, they cannot read nor write. However, if a user can read your forum (if they have a read password, or if you do not have any read passwords on your forum), then the write-password is the next step.

Because of the limited amount of space for passwords, you may want to assign passwords to groups of users--that is, more than one person uses the same password.

If you have problem users, changing a password may mean informing many users who require that password for access. Here is a tip on handling this type of management...

When you first give a new-user an access password, give them a temporary password. After the user is found to be "reliable", then you give them a "permanent" password, that is, one for a group of more-trusted users. In doing this, you can periodically change the temporary passwords without the necessity of informing regular visitors, who are found to be trustworthy and already are using one of the passwords in your read or write password list.

You may find it useful to keep a list of visitors to whom you assign passwords, along with each of their e-mail addresses. This will help to notify users in the case of password changes.

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