Issue is I had to submit it to get the Search engine on the site to work correctly. I feel there has been enough crawls up to this point where im not sure I need it but as soon as I do shut it down my search function is going to go to shit. Thats the main issue I have in shuting down public access to it at the moment but Im sure something can be worked out to fix it.

I have a search engine embedded crawling my site everyday. I think I need to shut it down now though.

In what format does the forum store its usernames and passwords?

It seems like a relatively simple program set up as a cron job should be able to save a copy of the user list in a format than some ftp server can read, or at least into standard passwd file format so the library could be moved to http and access could be limited via .htaccess.

With a little more effort, you could probably even limit it to users who have made a certain number of posts without too much trouble.