[Forum] Advice / Feeback regarding multiple forums and subforums, please.

[James Cole]

Here's our main forum page: http://www.marineengine.com/boat-forum/forum.php
Threads 64,060 Posts 305,872 Members 47,304

We have a good number of forums, some of which have a huge number of sub-forums as a result of our old software. Our old forum (active for many years) was set to archive every few weeks and those archives became sub-forums when we migrated to vB.

Anyone have advice on how to manage old threads in a way that is useful for users and crawlers alike? Obviously a fleet of sub-forums is not it. But I'm not sure what IS a good system.

I'm also wondering if a large number of sub-forums is slowing down the forumdisplay.php page. Some users are complaining about slowness, which I have learned is no surprise. I'm following various pieces of advice about improving performance. Today it occurred to me to ask the community about the sub-forums.

So... Any thoughts on sub-forum and archive organization would be welcome. And tell me if a boatload of subs is killing performance. Thank you!

[Ramsesx]

Hi James, for my taste it's fine as it is now. Others may see it different. The advantage to keep it on subforums may be better rankings for those keywords. Have you tried this?

[James Cole]

Thanks Ramsesx. I have read the sitepoint page you linked to, and made some of the changes so far, starting with the Nasty Query on formumdisplay.php.