Need query to set Permissions Masks to Read-Only for forums

[AtariAge]

Greetings!

I am going to update my 3.4.8 forum to 4.4.x very soon..  When I do this, I will be taking the existing forum offline and upgrading it on a new server, and when the upgrade is complete I will be switching DNS for the domain to the new server.  However, I'd much prefer to leave the live forum online, but in a "read only" state.  That is, allow members to still browse and read posts, but not enter any new replies.  I need to remove the "Reply Topics", "Start Topics", and "Upload" permissions from all the permission masks (except Admin, #4) for each forum, except for one forum in particular (id #26, which is an Announcements forum).  

I'm not familiar with how permissions are stored in the database, but hoping someone here would be able to craft a query (or queries) to do what I am describing above.  

Thanks in advance for any help. 

[Mark H]

We strongly recommend not editing the database directly as that can cause fatal errors.

That said, there's another option if you have a reasonably small number of Groups.

Click the "Permissions" padlock icon to the right of each Group, and disallow "Post New Topics" and Reply To Topics" using the header check box (click it twice to deselect the permission for all forums), then on the other Application tabs (Calendar, Gallery, Downloads), remove any permissions which would allow them to add any new content:

Save the group and repeat for the other groups.

[AtariAge]

Thanks for your feedback Mark, much appreciated. 

The main reason I asked is I'm trying to streamline this upgrade as much as possible, as it's going to probably take at least six hours to run, and that's assuming I don't run into any snags.  I have quite a few Member Groups on the forum, but I realized after your post that I don't really have that many active Permission Masks.  I went and looked at my primary groups and they are shared by a small number of masks.  So I can update these pretty quickly after I take the forum offline to dump the database, and once the database has been dumped, I can then put the forum back online with these updated permissions so people can still read the forum but not post, except in the one Announcements forum.  However, I do need to take screenshots of all the permission masks in case something goes wrong with the upgrade and I need to put my 3.4.8 forum back online (which will be easy, since I'm doing the upgrade on another server... all I'd need to do is carefully reset the permissions back to their original values).  

 ..Al