MyBB Community Forums

We're looking to set up a large number of boards. Topics will be for 50 major US cities and then for states.

So we want to set up something like this:

New York City
General
For Sale

Buffalo
General
For Sale

New York (state)
New York City (point to New York City forums)
Buffalo (point to New York City forums)
General
For Sale
Syracuse

So we have main -> city -> topic (for major cities)
main -> state -> city (for smaller cities)

We've been looking pretty seriously at the combination of vBulletin + vbseo is very interesting for people who are not doing this for free (yes, we've heard of craigslist).

However, MyBB because it's fast, attractive plus it's open source and not subject to licensing issues.

My question is this: if we have 75 major cities with an average of 4-5 boards plus 50 states with another 4-5 boards each, is this going to be a problem for MyBB? Given that we're talking around 500 forums.

We had been looking at setting up 1 forum per state so we're not afraid of doing that - as long as we could share authorization info across the forums. In other words, there might be 1 forum at the start but California ends up getting its own. We don't want users to have to do anything differently.

Thanks!

It all depends on the amount of members, posts, and the server.

You could also have one forum per state, and make the for sale, ect. forums a sub forum of each state.

If you had 10 members and 100 posts, there would be no issues on a small hosting account. But if you had 10000 members, you may need a dedicated server.

Considering that your estimate is "500 forums" I would guess that you are anticipating a lot of members, and a lot of posts. For a messageboard of that size you will need a dedicated server (or huge hosting account), but the speed of the forum would be the same if you chose MyBB, phpBB, or vBulletin.

So it's not going to be a "problem" for MyBB, just a small annoyance if your forum runs slower.

As far as my understanding goes, MyBB isn't exactly open source, but it's free.

DennisTT Wrote:As far as my understanding goes, MyBB isn't exactly open source, but it's free.

Open Source is defined as a "method and philosophy for software
licensing and distribution designed to encourage use and
improvement of software written by volunteers by ensuring that
anyone can copy the source code and modify it freely"

Surely the fact that the creators of MyBB allow anyone to make mods for MyBB and change the code themselves means that it is in fact Open Source.

Not the redistribution part.

We're still working with MyBB but we do have it up and running pretty well, I think.

We're US-oriented, so we've divided the US by state and then picked the 5 (or 4) biggest metro areas per state. We figure we can always add more forums once we start getting traffic.

So
California
Los Angeles
Sacramento
San Diego
San Francisco
San Jose

We're going to set it up later so that the "forums" button on "http://losangeles.mypages.com" shows "losangeles.mypages.com/forums" rather than "http://www.mypages.com/forums/forumdisplay.php?fid=31"

Same place but we think the city/forums URLs are easier for people to remember or link to.

So far, we've been very happy with MyBB. We're running 3 Apache webservers in front of two MySQL servers. Hard to tell performance issues yet - we need to get a lot more people using the forums before we have issues.