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!

[Lynne]

Yes, a lot of subforums can slow down a page, but I really don't think you have that many subforums that I can see.

Um, whoops, I just did a bit more looking around, like in this forum - http://www.marineengine.com/boat-forum/forumdisplay.php?26-Johnson-Evinrude-Outboard-Forum - and you have a lot of subforums listed.

However, many of those subforums only have about 50 threads each which is hardly anything. Any reason, you don't put them all into the main forum? Do you need to have them in separate forums - are the threads closed after a while or something? Is there a good reason to have them grouped as they are?

[James Cole]

The subforums are organized the way they are as a result of an old archiving system that didn't really translate to vB, so when we moved them over we made them subforums on the import. Everything in the "archives" is closed. I'm thinking it make more sense to have one archive subforum (per forum) with everything from the past as opposed to all the small subs. Does that make sense?

[ProFifaLeagues]

Yeah that should ease the load a little doing it that way James!
But is that amount really needed on the forum mate?
Would there not be a better option with maybe one forum for the old Archives?

[Lynne]

Yeah, I would merge them all into just one archive forum.

[James Cole]

Thanks for the feedback!