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What is the best way to create a forum farm?

robertuvarobertuva New
in Vanilla 2.0 - 2.8

I am looking to create a forum farm that has multiple forums with a single login. I am thinking that it may be easiest to use one forum install and use tags to create the appearance of different forums. The worry I have with that method includes the following:

  1. Is there a mod that would allow me to force a specific tag when posting a new discussion?
  2. What would you do in this instance for "clean-up"? I assume at some point you need to delete older threads to keep performance going well, but some tags may only have 1-2 discussions on them but still be old - I wouldn't want to delete those so some content exists for those tags.

Wondering if anyone has any suggestions or if anything like this exists already. I'm looking to have 10,000+ forums.

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    UnderDogUnderDog MVP

    Oh boy ... name 2 examples of the forums that you want to create ...
    first thing that comes to mind is 'categories' and another thing is : think hosted platform instead of open source

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    vrijvlindervrijvlinder Papillon-Sauvage MVP

    Have you tried having one forum ? Then you can see what you can do with this and later create the other 9999... :D

    ❌ ✊ ♥. ¸. ••. ¸♥¸. ••. ¸♥ ✊ ❌

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    robertuvarobertuva New
    edited July 2014

    Would categories allow for 10K+ forums? It may start more so at like 1K, but it needs scalability upward. Examples include soccer teams, so some could be:

    Junior (Barranquilla)
    La Equidad (Bogotá)
    Millonarios (Bogotá)

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    vrijvlindervrijvlinder Papillon-Sauvage MVP

    You can have up to 200 categories and then your forum will crawl to a stop... But you can have parent categories and subcategories. The discussions would be the forums. So in one category it is about Millonarios Bogota and you can start one million discussions about Millonarios .

    Each discussion counts as a forum.

    ❌ ✊ ♥. ¸. ••. ¸♥¸. ••. ¸♥ ✊ ❌

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    robertuvarobertuva New
    edited July 2014

    And btw, it would be nice to have sub-categories if nesting is possible. For example, soccer teams can be part of a league. It is possible I branch out of soccer to another sport as well, so then you would have different leagues in different sports as well. That said, I thought having that many categories was an issue.

    EDIT: we posted at the same time vrijvlinder! I am in need of having the ability to have more than 200. I know it sounds like a lot, but that's the requirement.

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    UnderDogUnderDog MVP
    edited July 2014

    Ok ... trying to think ahead ... how about one vanilla instance per sport? Will you make it with 200 categories and subcategories per sport? Nesting is possible.

    Still think in hosted platform, since they host mucho forums, so you need their version, their setup, etc...

    Here's a link to one setup for multiple forums:http://vanillaforums.org/discussion/23877/1-step-vanilla-dev-sites

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    vrijvlindervrijvlinder Papillon-Sauvage MVP

    Ok , then I would recommend installing Vanilla in several subdirectories to spread the load around then link them so the same sign in works for all .

    I don't know of any forum software that can handle the load but you can do it as long as you don't mind other things breaking or not functioning properly.

    You need to understand how the data is retrieved to see the impact on functionality.

    But as I said before , install in one forum and push it to the limits, it is the only way to know for sure...

    ❌ ✊ ♥. ¸. ••. ¸♥¸. ••. ¸♥ ✊ ❌

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    robertuvarobertuva New

    There could easily be more than 200 per sport. Not more than 200 per league, but definitely 200 per sport. Take soccer for instance - that alone will have more than 200. Same for baseball.

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    UnderDogUnderDog MVP

    Well ... let's see what @Linc thinks about this and @tim for the magical technical stuff ... @x00 and @businessdad can chime in for scalability and technical stuff ...

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    hgtonighthgtonight ∞ · New Moderator

    @vrijvlinder said:
    You can have up to 200 categories and then your forum will crawl to a stop...

    You can have as many categories as you want. The 200 limit is when you want to sort categories. Even this can be done by temporarily changing some PHP settings.

    I understand the want to have a category for everything, but that requires some serious moderator effort and content generation.

    10,000 forums with 1 or 3 posts in each one is going to feel like a no man's land even though there are 20,000 posts on the forum.

    Search first

    Check out the Documentation! We are always looking for new content and pull requests.

    Click on insightful, awesome, and funny reactions to thank community volunteers for their valuable posts.

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    vrijvlindervrijvlinder Papillon-Sauvage MVP

    I don't think I would even read more than 10 categories on a site . Takes too much time to go thru 200 much more to go through 10k . It is a good way to make people skip your site.

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    x00x00 MVP

    10,000+ forums is crazy.

    Is this a business idea?

    grep is your friend.

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