I'd like to see ideas from other sites on ways to implement the private directories.

On my site, we run a couple of fantasy games that are only available to community members who are signed up at a premium level (we have about 100 premium level members and we also include our 50-or-so volunteer site moderators at this level for free).

One of the fantasy games will start next month and is a two-member team "Amazing Race" type game where we send them on an Internet scavenger hunt finding the location of weird city landmarks that we've seen on the web.

We're planning on making the game competition pages reside in private directories ensuring that only group members who have signed up for one of our premium levels can see these pages and "play" the game. We don't use Thrive for our power groups but do it by hand, but it's not that tough to do.

I'd love to hear other ideas on neat ways to use a private directory to enrich our community for our site members.

Thanks

You may get some ideas from this topic and replies after it.

As I see it, the common use will be to set aside sections of your website for 'members only'. As you suggest, these might be important files or special content. If you've ever wanted to hook up some registration system that applies to your whole website, this is the way. Or if you want to extend your eve membership as a 'single-sign-on' to other web projects -- this will do it.

PWD [private web directories] can control scripts in the same way as regular web stuff like HTML, images and MP3s.

I'm guessing that advanced webmasters will figure out fast that you easily can use power group permissions for PWD.

And last -- anyone considering charging for 'protected content' has an off-the-shelf payment system in Thrive. Premium group permissions can easily be used to control access to your website using PWD.

One of the things we're planning to do with my father's company website is to create a series of small- to medium-sized web applications that provide useful tools for other arborists. These web apps will be inside the private web directories, and access will be granted through Thrive (i.e. you have to pay to get access to these applications).

I think that this would be an especially neat solution because the tools can provide useful services, that are made available on a subscription basis through Thrive -- that is, limited-term access to the application is granted through the use of Thrive permissions combined with the private web directories, whereas with a downloadable application, it's a one-time-only payment (that's not even guaranteed if people don't pay the shareware fee).

Yeah, this tool is amazing powerful. Especially when you use it like MinutiaeMan mentioned. Combining it with Thrive allows you to potentially generate some serious revenue.