Private forums are available for Supporters, Johann (those that pay for Premium Membership). https://www.writingforums.org/showthread.php?t=5508
There is a private forum for supporters, but as mentioned, it's not exactly active. This is because we only have a few supporting members at the moment. The Writing Workshops are semi-private in that you must be registered to read the threads. Guests and search engines can't read them. I'm curious as to what type of private forum(s) you were looking for?
Clarifying ... "off the search trains" ... keeping your writing from people who aren't members? Keeping the boss from seeing that you spend the evenings as a half-elf or as a technical engineer on a defunct space station? As far as supporting members ... I know I've seen this before somewhere but is there anyway to become a supporter without having to go through paypal?
That isn't as private as you think. There are accounts created by archive bots, so although there won't be search engine references back to here, your work can still end up viewable anonymously. When I was a moderator, I was able to identify and eradicate some of these parasites, but I have no illusions about having eliminated all of them. The only truly private forums are ones with a specified member list, and only if you can trust everyone on that list. We don't have those at the present time.
What Cog said is true. If there's enough demand for private forums for critique, I could possibly set up private critique groups. They aren't forums, but they'd probably be better for this purpose.
