I can see in the SMF 2.1 features option Deny access to boards.
How it is done?
Complicatedly.
Then I can not use it.
Why? Do you need to know how something internally works to be able to use it?
What exactly do you need to know?
No, but i couldn't find instructions how to use it.
See, I thought you were after an explanation of how it physically worked under the hood, which struck me as a little bizarre.
I don't think 2.1's manual is finished yet because you're not really supposed to use it in production, so the only people who should be using it are people prepared to explore and test things.
As for how to use it, I'm not sure where the complexity is, it works like allow/deny permissions as described in the manual: for any given board, if a group is marked as A, that group can see the board. If a group is marked as X, that group won't see the board - but if a user has two groups and one of them is an A, the X gets ignored. If a user has D, that means they can't see it pretty much regardless of anything (admins can but that's it)
There's a better explanation of how permissions work as a general idea - http://wiki.simplemachines.org/smf/SMF2.0:Permissions#About_Permissions - the same A/X/D logic applies here too.
Thanks a lot, I'll play with it.
I was using old mod view only boards , with some modification it worked on smf 2.1
Deny is not about showing boards to guests, which by the way has historically shown to be a bad idea, but is to make sure you can do things like make a troublemaker group where they can only see a few boards even if they would otherwise be able to see most things.