Large numbers of sub-forums

[forteanajones]

My client is dedicating a set of forums to a specific topic, and has asked me to look into the feasibility of creating one sub-forum per sub-topic. I pushed back initially, and then he talked me into looking into it further. Later when I did the math, I realized this would entail 100,000+ sub-forums!

Clearly that is far, far beyond the capabilities of a single vBulletin instance, but could someone help me understand exactly why that is?

Second question: In a bizarre, imaginary world where such an uber vBulletin site were actually created somehow, what might it look like? Ten or more separate vB instances, bridged by user-related tables?

Third question: Since this project has zero funding (at this early juncture) and only one developer (myself) I am probably going to steer him towards a different solution involving thread prefixes, tags, a strong moderator community and perhaps a little search engine customization, if I can manage it. Does that sound like the best approach? To be honest, I haven't played around with prefixes or tags yet, but it looks like they will help somewhat.

Thanks in advance.

[Zachery]

For every forum, there is a set of permissions stored in the datastore. Number of groups permissions x number of forums = lots of permissions to be stored. 8 groups X 100,000 forums = lots of memory usage, not to mention time to process. Just think of what a nightmare it would be for a user to even navigate such a site like this.

Eh, i would never visit that forum. But it would probably be with re-written code to handle how forums are displayed. Even still 100,000 forums would be overkill.

Yes, it would be. Tags should take care of the content itself.

[forteanajones]

Thanks, Zachery. I really appreciate the speedy reply and quick breakdown. Clearly such a monster would be a huge undertaking for a database engineer.

Can thread prefixes and tags even handle that many entries? What's the upper limit?

[Zachery]

As far as I am aware there is no limit on tags, prefixes not sure.

You should be able to break down the forums better with tags and prefixes than before. You might be able to get down to 100 forums, with tags for each.

[forteanajones]

Cool, I will begin researching methods for creating large numbers of tags and prefixes.

Zachery, is there any way you could research the upper limit question for prefixes, or direct me to a resource that can help me make that determination? I'm totally open to experimentation on my end, but it would be nice to know in advance if the effort is even worthwhile (rather than via trial and error).

The sub-forums are devoted to titles of movies, so a number like 100 would probably not cover it, unless we organized by genre or something. Therefore I'm probably looking at a small number of well-organized forums and sub-forums.

I can see we're going to need some well-defined policies and workflows, and some well-trained admins and mods. That's all fine, but I'm concerned that our users will feel things are too heavyhanded.

Anyway, thanks again!

[Zachery]

You do not need to create tags, most of the time communitys work well on creating, moderating, and working within their own tags.

I'll see what I can do about prefixs, though honestly tags may be your best bet.

[forteanajones]

Hm, I just realized that the text strings we would use for tags will often need to contain commas. The only way I can think of around that is to locate or create a modificiation of some sort. Have you run into that problem before?