2012-09-26, 06:45 PM
Hello All,
I've got here after reading many positive reviews about myBB, and am now considering migrating our existing forums to this platform.
In short, I am now running a 10 year old project-portal on phpBB 2.0.23. Approximately 100,000 users, 500,000 posts (we prune old posts regularly). We have initially started with one site, and then spread to another five. So now we're having six different sites sharing the same database.
Different from site to site:
- URLs (however they are all along the same topic - read below)
- Themes (each one has a different coloring, but the same "structure")
- *some* sections (and child forums) are only available in some sites (local forums), while others are available across the board (global forums).
Problems we're having now:
- outdated software (but secure, have secured it years ago and have never had any issues)
- lack of new features - some newer features we'd like to implement we cannot because they are incompatible with some older ones
- all six sites are located under different domain names AND in different folders in Apache - similar files are replicated with symlinks, while others are individual to each site - very hard to manage
- tough upgrades or new module installations
- dependence on the hosting company (they have shown some flexibility years ago when we decided to share the database between different sites) - in the sense that we cannot just take everything and move it to the different server - which in this case would be beneficial as our visitors come from a different locale than the one the server is in - this trend has changed over the years, but we were stuck with that company for the reasons shown above
- quite tough administration - some redundancy in what I'm doing (instead of doing certain actions once, I have to do them six times)
- some issues with notification emails, sent from site A (because that's where a last responder posted from) to a user who normally goes for instance to site D - and is hence confusing her by redirecting to a different site that she's used to.
The six sites are following the same pattern (those are obviously example URLs):
a. www.ford.com
b. www.chrysler.com
c. www.dodge.com
d. www.gm.com
e. www.cadillac.com
f. www.ram.com
And what we now require is to move the platform to a modern one, preferably one that allows for sending all six different URLs to the same folder on the web server, and which by means of the URL to decide which sections are visible, which theme appears, and how notifications are sent to users watching topics or forums.
An alternative (if no existing platform or none that we can afford has those futures) is to consolidate the sites in one (to go by the previous example, that would be www.americancars.com), as long as the users could easily be classified into one of the subcategories listed above (in this example, car brand), and would get a somewhat different experience depending on which community they belong to).
Thank you for all your answers. I am really hoping that mybb can do the above, as I'd really like to propose this platform.
Regards,
John
P.S. Please don't hesitate to ask any related questions.
I've got here after reading many positive reviews about myBB, and am now considering migrating our existing forums to this platform.
In short, I am now running a 10 year old project-portal on phpBB 2.0.23. Approximately 100,000 users, 500,000 posts (we prune old posts regularly). We have initially started with one site, and then spread to another five. So now we're having six different sites sharing the same database.
Different from site to site:
- URLs (however they are all along the same topic - read below)
- Themes (each one has a different coloring, but the same "structure")
- *some* sections (and child forums) are only available in some sites (local forums), while others are available across the board (global forums).
Problems we're having now:
- outdated software (but secure, have secured it years ago and have never had any issues)
- lack of new features - some newer features we'd like to implement we cannot because they are incompatible with some older ones
- all six sites are located under different domain names AND in different folders in Apache - similar files are replicated with symlinks, while others are individual to each site - very hard to manage
- tough upgrades or new module installations
- dependence on the hosting company (they have shown some flexibility years ago when we decided to share the database between different sites) - in the sense that we cannot just take everything and move it to the different server - which in this case would be beneficial as our visitors come from a different locale than the one the server is in - this trend has changed over the years, but we were stuck with that company for the reasons shown above
- quite tough administration - some redundancy in what I'm doing (instead of doing certain actions once, I have to do them six times)
- some issues with notification emails, sent from site A (because that's where a last responder posted from) to a user who normally goes for instance to site D - and is hence confusing her by redirecting to a different site that she's used to.
The six sites are following the same pattern (those are obviously example URLs):
a. www.ford.com
b. www.chrysler.com
c. www.dodge.com
d. www.gm.com
e. www.cadillac.com
f. www.ram.com
And what we now require is to move the platform to a modern one, preferably one that allows for sending all six different URLs to the same folder on the web server, and which by means of the URL to decide which sections are visible, which theme appears, and how notifications are sent to users watching topics or forums.
An alternative (if no existing platform or none that we can afford has those futures) is to consolidate the sites in one (to go by the previous example, that would be www.americancars.com), as long as the users could easily be classified into one of the subcategories listed above (in this example, car brand), and would get a somewhat different experience depending on which community they belong to).
Thank you for all your answers. I am really hoping that mybb can do the above, as I'd really like to propose this platform.
Regards,
John
P.S. Please don't hesitate to ask any related questions.