Some of the Biggest Forums have Little Secrets

Take for example the message boards of huge providers like phpBB and vBulletin.

These are perhaps the most widely used of all other forums but other sites employ some of their own. For example proboards is one but highly an unreliable source due to the strict nature of a team looking only to have under-aged users supply content and limited Disney 13 and under set of guidelines. There's also the InvisionFree, Network54, and various coms to name but a few of the widely used platforms.

 There's also the huge message board system designed by the International Movie Database.

The secrets of these platforms aren't so much secret as they are a double offering of free account management and paid for services. For instance with the last mentioned forum platform they have the regular use forums and another entirely hidden yet fully functional Pro Version.

It is said that if a member has been on their database for a long enough period of time, they could access the Pro forums without having to pay for the use of those hidden communities that no doubt would be more closely watched by the team that monitors the entire database.

But this is just a rumor I heard and wouldn't know if it's actually true or not. The link here seems to work for those who do have already existing and older accounts. More or less it's simply a workaround for those who don't know about this feature.

The forum giants of the vBulletin platform are far more advanced than they were five years ago and that is where the recent crop of secret and hidden forum offerings have been abounding in network circles.

The secret of the vBulletin workaround is to apply a sub group within the forum itself, if done by a member, and the group has the heading close enough to the name of the forum as a whole, that member has access to moderator functions of the entire forum. Right now there doesn't seem to be a patch for this and so the workaround is there for anyone who happens to know about it.
The big secret with phpBB is pretty much the same as the vBulletin loop, but in this instance, you create a board within an already existing block of topics which is granted as an extra automatic privilege depending on the length of time that member has been there. Of course, with that in mind, it would stand to reason that a long term member would not exploit such a hole in security, but that hole does exist nonetheless.