Subscription and Restricted Access Forums

Is there a way to enable a private section of forums for customers who have paid a subscription to access them?

Also, is there a way to distinguish between public and private forums? Ex, Public for non-registered customers, and private for registered customers.

Thanks in advance.

Currently no, not without code customization.  However this would be a good feature to add.

Some thoughts on the subject...

Customer Roles properties could be expanded to include access to private forums. If you want them to only have access to *certain* private forums, rather than all, then you can still do this by customer role, but you may end up with a lot of them.

Subscriptions are currently supported yet either, as far as I know. This would be relatively easy to manage though, since no shipping or tax is involved, you could treat similar to digital content.

Also, is there, or will there be, a way to lock forum topics?

not currently, you can edit, delete, move, watch or change priority.  It may look just like phpBB but it doesn't have all the functionality of a full phpBB configuration.

As for whether it's coming, hard to see the future is...