Will Vbulletin handle this ? 6k sub - categories?

[katie hunter]

While, i would love to use VB 5.x, at its current state, it looks to me it will take another year to become stable with better features.

I asked this question on Discourse but out of curiosity, will this work with Vb 5.x without issues?

I know with Vb 4.x, based on past exp, creating so many sub categories caused server issues, however, i don't know if this is the same case with Vb 5.x

I will leave this topic here which is basically asking the same question https://meta.discourse.org/t/will-discourse-handle-this-6k-sub-categories/13698/last

So would this be easy for a web developer to do/code after playing around with vb 5.x back-end or does it require extensive knowledge, if our web developer isn't familiar with Vbulletin at all? Will it be easy to use that many sub categories without seeing any major issues?

Another reason i liked Discourse, was that we can create a Login API so that members from our homepage can login with their account onto the discourse forum, does VB 5.x has anything similar to this feature/function or make it easy to code ?

[Adrian Schneider]

Anything over 50 forums reeks of an information architecture problem. Less than 20 is probably more ideal for visitors. I'm guessing you have some sort of dynamic content that you are creating forums (or sets of forums for)... This is what tags (self-building) or prefixes (predefined: x forums * y prefixes) are for.

I'm not trying to rag on you... we've just been there, and it always ends horribly wrong. Most forums have the forums cached, and the complex permissions data structures are also cached and stored per forum.

Even if you survive the short to medium to performance issues, they'll never work when you hit any sort of critical scale, but you'll give up long before then with maintenance issues.

BTW - I asked a similar question on Discourse - https://meta.discourse.org/t/content-organization-categories-groups-locations/12184/2 - the answer wasn't very helpful, but I think my post above is the real answer.

[katie hunter]

Anything over 50 forums reeks of an information architecture problem. Less than 20 is probably more ideal for visitors. I'm guessing you have some sort of dynamic content that you are creating forums (or sets of forums for)... This is what tags (self-building) or prefixes (predefined: x forums * y prefixes) are for.

I'm not trying to rag on you... we've just been there, and it always ends horribly wrong. Most forums have the forums cached, and the complex permissions data structures are also cached and stored per forum.

Even if you survive the short to medium to performance issues, they'll never work when you hit any sort of critical scale, but you'll give up long before then with maintenance issues.

BTW - I asked a similar question on Discourse - https://meta.discourse.org/t/content-organization-categories-groups-locations/12184/2 - the answer wasn't very helpful, but I think my post above is the real answer.

Umm so a short answer is that discourse won't be able to handle such task nor vb, well vb i know.

I couldn't understand Jeff's reply..

If both can't do this task, which forum would be able to do this like MAL http://myanimelist.net/forum/?subboard=1 or code our own simple forum structure based on what we have already ?

http://www.nihonomaru.com/anime/41/shingeki-no-kyojin-%28tv%29/forum
http://www.nihonomaru.com/anime/shingeki-no-kyojin-%28tv%29/41/forum/what-do-you-like-about-attack-on-titan-/3

[Adrian Schneider]

The problem is not with the software, it's with the IA.

The nested forum model does not work that well... that's why Discourse is limited to two levels. Nobody wants to browse 8 levels deep, nor do they want to browse hundreds of forums.

Having a few basic categories, and combine it with heavy tagging, and you can achieve what you want. For the sake of an example, look at how StackOverflow uses tagging. You can combine any number of tags, and for all intent's and purposes, a tag is basically a forum. You can combine them as many times as you want, or can you view a single one.

Compare that with the forum structure, you end up having x * y forums (or x * y * z, as in my case with locations), and it creates a horrible mess. You have duplication, but you can't make changes without having to update all of the others as well. Then, things get out of sync, and it creates a lot of extra work to maintain.

Anyway - this is just my opinion on the matter. I'm sure many forum owners will disagree. :)

Cheers

[katie hunter]

Well with StackOverflow they are using tags, they tag topics, not categories... Our case is different x/ we aren't tagging topics, we want a main category let say call it "Anime" with an alphabet A-Z sorting for the sub categories and each sub-category has its own topics.

Sub - category represent each anime title http://myanimelist.net/forum/?subboard=1

Would this be the same issue if i tried this with XF? i know XF is light. And since it is using Zend framework, we are familiar with it. I am hesitant to buy XF just to face the same issue, also the company's bullying manners which i disliked very much.

[Zachery]

You really have to get away from having so many forums. You've got to move to tags/topic prefixes.

[katie hunter]

You really have to get away from having so many forums. You've got to move to tags/topic prefixes.

But how to achieve this? We're connecting a feature/function within our homepage to a forum. These tag/topic prefixes works per topics not per sub categories.

[Lynne]

You can link to a forum prefix that will only show topics with that prefix. I would strongly suggest not overloading your site with forums (50 is a lot). Don't forget that you want to make it easy for your users to find what they want and they do not want to go in and out of various forums, and various levels of forums, to find what they are interested in.

[katie hunter]

Hi Lynne, our aim is to make it look like this http://myanimelist.net/forum/?subboard=1 with pagination and browsing i guess sub categories based on alphabet. So that specific structure.

I think i understand what you're trying to say, to link our Anime forums to prefixes so having a list of prefixes in alphabet from A-Z and each prefix will link to its topics, but the trick here is creating topics that belong to that specific prefix, 7k prefixes to choose from, is kinda more work than sub categories, don't you think ?

[Zachery]

I think you'd be better off breaking up your forums into Genre's and then having prefixes per forum to handle that sort of setup.

vBulletin.org does this already pretty well with the mod forums.

If you feel a specific anime, is getting big enough, or enough traffic, you can give it its own subforum.

[katie hunter]

Hi Zachery, i am not quite following what you mean, VB has genres ?

Btw is this possible with VB 5.x i know this function isn't there for vb 4.x and it is kinda complicated to do unlike discourse, they make it easy.

Another reason i liked Discourse, was that we can create an API so that members from our homepage can login with their account onto the discourse forum with their homepage data, does VB 5.x has anything similar to this feature/function or make it easy to code ?

I think it is this https://meta.discourse.org/t/official-single-sign-on-for-discourse/13045

[Zachery]

You'd break your forum categories down by genre's and then use prefixes in each forum to handle shows.

[katie hunter]

Thanks :0) Will see what we can do.

I couldn't find an answer for this, does VB 5.x offers an easy way like an API plugin that we can use if we want to connect our personal project let say our homepage members' account with vb? And they wouldn't need to create a separate account just to login to vb.

With Discourse, they make this process easy with a Single Login.


Another reason i liked Discourse, was that we can create an API so that members from our homepage can login with their account onto the discourse forum with their homepage data, does VB 5.x has anything similar to this feature/function or make it easy to code ?

[Zachery]

There is a full API for vBulletin 5, you can make use of it. Sadly, its not nearly as well documented as it could be.

[katie hunter]

For the time being, I think we will experiment with Discourse, I still love its simplicity but a year later when Vb 5.x becomes better and more stable and its API becomes well documented, we will consider changing to VB 5.x or 6.x

[katie hunter]

There is a full API for vBulletin 5, you can make use of it. Sadly, its not nearly as well documented as it could be.

I am actually looking into the API for my new project, does VB knows when it will become well documented?

[joeychgo]

When its ready :)