Hi ledzep. Welcome to the forums!

So let's make this really easy on YOU and only a wee bit of effort on the part of your forum members okay? Make them register instead of you trying to automagically giving them everything.

The first thing you need to do, if you haven't already done so, is to allow registration. That'll be on one of the sub-tabs under "Global settings" - a check box that you will want to check.

Then on your forum post a message saying "if you want a blog then go to the login link (even though you didn't register) so you can find the register link". Or you can be nice and give it to them, but heck make 'em work for it. Weird eh? Like, someone wants to register so they have to somehow know to use the login link in order to find the register link. Oh well!

Anyway YES by all means edit any and all info you have in the back office. You can edit all the bits about the existing blogs, deprecate or delete all the existing posts AFTER YOU READ THEM, add new blogs - whatever suits your fancy. Oh and yeah read all that stuff cuz it's kinda designed to help you figure stuff out by showing you.

EVENTUALLY it'll start making sense, then it gets crazy. Know up front that each user will have to be in a group AND that permission to do stuff might come from the user's permissions OR the group's permissions. Like for example if you put them all in the same group and you want them all to be able to post in blogs A and B then you will go to the "Blog Settings -> pick a blog -> advanced" subtab and check a box for something like "enable advanced permissions". Or something like that. Like magic you'll get new tabs that let you set up your user and group permissions. From there you go to the Group Permissions subtab and start to get a feel for what you want your new bloggers to do.

I suggest you open another browser (or use another computer) and pretend to be "YOU THE ADMIN" on our current browser/computer, and "SOME RANDOM PERSON" on the other. That way you'll know for sure what each change of permissions and settings gives and takes from your users.

Takes a while to get the hang of everything because there's a hell of a lot going on. multi multi multi and every imaginable combination is what the software is trying to handle is the thing.

Have fun with it too!

Thanks a lot for the detailed response! The part about the global setting for the new registrations burns me, I should have been able to figure that out on my own.

Thanks for the help, I'll get working on it now and see how things go.