running multiple forums off same files?
 

ok, what I'm trying to do is this:
I want to install vbulletin, but be able to create different forums running off of the same files etc. Basically I have a site where it is geared towards colleges. I want to be able to have 1 forum for each college, and thus have unique users, forums, admins, etc for each college, but i want it all to run on the same files.
I think that each time I add a forum i'll just add new tables to the database and what not, and the forum will have a variable in the query defining what school it's for.

Anyone know what I'm talking about, and if there is a pre-made method to do this?
thanks

Can't you just make the forums and assign different permissions?

what exactly do you mean? I'd have to make a group for each school I wanted a forum for etc?
Issue with that is I want the user count and post count to be unique for that school, not be the overall amount for all schools.

easy way to do that is getting another vb license and create a subdomain for each college.I think that will be easy and have seperate overall post for each

but if I have 100 schools, I can not afford to buy 100 vb licenses.

Admin CP > Forum Manager > Add New Forum
Admin CP > Forum Manager > Forum Permissions

dismounted -
you're saying i'd have different forums for each school, and allow members from those schools permission to view those forums.
That may possibly work, but these questions/issues arise:

The post and user count will be for the entire forum, not per school correct?

The forum would be at same path? eg. school1.site.com and school2.site.com wont be useful since it'll point to the same forum?

Preferrably, i'd like it to be different tables in db per school and just have a central set of files if possible.

that would
1. require another vb license for each school
2. some modifications to the files.

As for the domain name it wont matter. If you set permission and you set all sub domains to the same url it wouldnt matter cause they would only see their forum since you set permissions on it.

But what you are saying is you want multiple vb forums with only using 1 license. You wouldnt be able to use just one license sorry.

The database would include all the users, post, threads etc...

Now when you try to split that into different schools all that is, is a different completely different forum.

So no its really not possible unless you have a license for every school.

Now what you could do is modify some stuff probably. Make a hack of some sort to query users from a certain usergroup. This will give you the total users per school. You would have to do this with post counts and all that as well.

If you want it that way, you'll have to spend a serious amount of cash on vBulletin licenses...

I dont understand why I'd need multiple licenses.
They will all be running on the same domain and intended for the same purpose, it's just I'd like to distinguish the members.

anyone? :D

So? Different content. Different Users.

but that still ignores the fact I want the user count and post count to be unique for each school.

You'd need to get more vBulletin licenses as that would imply different user tables (even if it didn't).