MyBB Community Forums

I have a need to create private discussion boards between any two organizations from a list of thousands of companies. The potential combinations of one-to-one forums could be in the millions.

Instead of developing this from scratch in my primary application, I think MyBB could be adapted to do it by implementing a forum for each two-party combination. I have experience with MyBB and class.MyBBIntegrator.php, which I use to automate the creation of the forums, users, permissions, etc.

The databse should be able to handle the scale. The question is, will the interface handle it? For example, what if I attempt to display the list of forums from the admin pages? Will it handle a million entries?

There isn't any pagination for the forums listed in the ACP. It would list all the forums in one big page which would take a long time to load (or possibly timeout/exhaust resources completely). The default database cache certainly wouldn't be able to handle such a large number of forums. You'd need to highly modify MyBB in to a scalable and highly efficient application to be able to complete such a project. I'm not saying MyBB is inefficient, but it just wasn't designed to cope with such a large amount of data.

You might be better off creating something from scratch. It would be much easier to develop and maintain.

You could do something along the lines of the private inquiries forum here; just with another party added to the list of people who may view a particular thread. So while supporting all possible combinations you'd not actually have to create a forum for each of them. You could still display them as views of forums. It'd still require some coding though.