Private Forums - how to use

Hello,
I read about "Managing a private forum..." https://permies.com/wiki/64607/Managing-private-forum-permies

I would like to find instructions for creating a private forum. I went to "Private Forums" https://permies.com/c/22   and clicked "new topic," which didn't work.

I'm seeing if permies.com is a usable platform for my local group, as our current online platform (Yahoo groups) is about to shut down. Therefore, we would be using it on an ongoing basis, and our members would need to be able to freely create new threads within the private group.

Does anyone know anything further?  Thanks.

A private forum would have to be created by staff, and they could make you moderator of it. You could add and remove people from it, and help keep an eye on it. People in that forum should be able to create threads just like they would in any other forum. Just let us know if we can help.

We've made a few private forums for local this and that.  

Two important things are, any account is required to meet the Real Sounding Name Policy https://permies.com/name.jsp and behaviour follows the Be Nice rule everyone agrees to when making an account.

Moderators can see private groups, but we generally ignore them unless for some reason we don't.  - deliberate vagueness to hopefully cover all eventualities.  

One thing I find useful for local groups, especially with buy-and-sell kind of situations is to lock the thread (staff have this power, but the group manager can signal when it's time to do that) and it sinks to the bottom while still being visible in an archival kind of fashion.  

Thanks for your help. I'll follow up soon if we want to do that. Otherwise, this thread will probably be useful to other people who are looking into private groups.