Theres no moral reason for the thread privacy to remain so locked down to guests.
There are however security implications.
Making threads viewable to guests means that webbots can trawl the site and obtain information posted on the forums eg. email addresses to send spam to. Although this works in favour of the site for SEO purposes imho this is not nescessarily in the interests of bona-fide forum users, who have in places posted email addresses, phone numbers or even addresses in threads.
Also i dont have that level of control on this site to change that setting
As for the link to the Modified Nationals 4 years past;
what would you suggest we link to there? To me it points out that we need new material, maybe actually have a meet. That or we just bin it which tbh is a step backwards rather than forwards, even if it is old.
Pukka might be able to change the view rights or if he knows the s12oc account pw then we can probably sort it. If not then we come back to whos actually got control at the moment.
When it was decided Kimble wasn't acting in the interests of the club his account was demoted to prevent further abuse of power, only for him to hack his way back in, from what I've seen only to repromote himself to admin[ego presumably].
It wouldn't surprise me if he'd locked out everyone else from the advanced admin panel, he was particularly bratty about the situation when he was last spoken to.
We could migrate host easily enough I but we come back to the issues above ie money and control. It wouldn't be right if the club asked for donations to fund alternative hosting and thus regain control over itself until either the funds kimble has taken are returned or the hosting term we've had from kimbles shared hosting facility is fair for the money taken.