5 Forums or 1 "Mega Forum"?
 

I have 5 very active communities, but they overlap on about 25% of the discussion (and members) and am considering merging them into 1 community that is broken down into separate areas. This will essentially allow me to better promote 1 community, not to mention greatly reduce the various licensing costs associated with running 5 communities (already merged down from 15 communities).

Here's an overview:

Forum #1:
Threads: 171,239
Posts: 2,541,401
Members: 31,618

Forum #2:
Threads: 65,784
Posts: 915,407
Members: 36,283

Forum #3:
Threads: 92,426
Posts: 1,018,239
Members: 119,278

Forum #4:
Threads: 51,849
Posts: 766,501
Members: 16,088

Forum #5:
Threads: 1,938
Posts: 16,218
Members: 3,029

TOTAL
Threads: 383,236
Posts: 5,257,766
Members: 206,296

The questions is, how will this effect my load ... and it there anything I can do make migration of the forums easier on me? They're all running a 3.5.x vB build, and I'm hoping to ImpEx them into the latest 3.6 build when it's all said and done.

Also, would it be better for me to upgrade to 3.6 first, then migrate? or migrate then upgrade the mega forum to 3.6?

Initial run-throughs of the ImpEx process have timed out at various stages, and I've been tweaking the php.ini to ensure the least possible downtime.

Thanks!

Well, do all the forums hold different discussions? What's different between all of them? I'd say go with one mega forum if you'd like to, because that's what I'd do.

The topics are hobby gaming in nature ... but there's a lot of crossover. Two of the forums are Comic Book based; Three of them are card games; Two of them are miniature games ... and then there's our Misc. Area, which happens to be popular across all 5 communities.

I just wanted to know if vBulletin can handle the new "Mega Site" ... on 1 dedicated server:
Dell PowerEdge 840
2.4 GHz 1066FSB - Conroe \ Xeon 3060 (Dual Core)
146GB:SAS:10K RPM
4GB RAM

I don't have any experience running anything that large on one database ... and I going to overload the server are it queries tables that will now be 4x-5x larger?

I don't see why it would have any more issues than if it was all seperate forums. Infact the multiple different forums would be running 10x the quiries if it was on one. Say you have 13 quiries per user per index.php page load. If you have 10 users going to 5 different forums on it thats 650 quiries simultaneously. You could lower that significantly if they all just went to one site.

I would go with one large forum if the topics are similar..

Same thought :)

Is it better to upgrade them all to 3.6.* first, or impex them then upgrade? I have to do it in 2 stages (2 into 1, and 3 into 1 ... then those 2 into 1).

How would it work? I mean some users might have the same accounts on all boards, or some users might not find their account when you merge everything together (duplicate accounts)..?

We're merging everything into the largest community, in order of size ... so everyone in the largest community will get to keep their username. Everyone else will get bumped if there's a conflict. Joining accounts by email.

Still can't get it to merge properly though .. keeps timing out regardless of php.ini settings.

Isn't this an issue with member/post/thread ID's though? I've got a similar situation and I continue to read that it's hard to do this because of the above.

I would pick your url that you want..
SiteA

merge siteB into siteA
Then update the counters, get the forums setup.
merge siteC into siteA
update counters....
merge siteD into siteA

etc....

Give me a buzz if you need a hand, I just got done merging a few forums together.


no, you can merge sites together with no problems ;)

Personally....

I wouldnt merge these forums together.

You have 5 large and active forums. (except # 5 -- maybe merge that into another one, maybe not. I would have to see it.)


Why wouldnt I merge? Simple. Advertising.

You can sell ads on all 5 forums for more then you can sell ads on 1. You have 5 times the banner ad space and those ads can be better targetted.

Another reason, right now, you could sell one of the 5 forums. Cant do that after the merge.

I would suggest you really think this through and err on the side of caution.

Very valid points ... and I have thought about this. I plan on keeping the sites cosmetically separate using the styles system built into vB. That being said, they will each have their own advertising capabilities because they will have a unique header and footer (where my ads are). The selling point is something I have never considered ... since I have no intention of selling them off one by one. I've spent a lot of time branding my communities (and have my company brand tattooed on my back). If I were ever to entertain an offer ... if would be for all communities combined, which is why I don't think that point applies to me.

I'm mainly looking for a performance issue ... will things run better, worse ... the same? I keep thinking that searching larger tables mean longer load times, but is that going to be negligible with proper indexing? I doubt scanning a 1 million post table versus scanning a 5 million post table is 5 times faster ... or is it?

I dunno. To me, its about flexibility. You narrow your options across the board by combining the sties. I prefer to be as fleixble as I can be.

Also, while talking about selling, you wil have a much harder time getting the value from one mega site, simply because as the price goes up, the number of people who can afford it dwindles.

As far as running better. I think it can be run similar as far as performance, but you'll ned the equipment to handle it. Im not even sure what you'll need but yes, I also would suspect that searching is going to place a much larger load.

You might want to discuss the performance aspect with vB development people directly. Im sure you'll need at least a number of servers, load balanced, and some super fast drives. But This is an area outside of my expertise.

One mega site seems nice, but it could just be the human greed involving it self..

Have you had any problems with the forums like these?..

You could merge 1 or 2 of the forums if there very similar.. but its totally up to you...

just don't do anything you will regret later on..

What are the URL's?

Going to baby step the process and end up with 2 sites ... at least that's the plan if I can just get ImpEx to do what I want it to do. LOL!

As for the sites, the largest one is www.hcrealms.com ; the other ones are in the header of that site. All Hobby Gaming related.

I would try hard to make 5 mega sites rather than 1 mega site. Put in the extra money for advertising and you will be set.

I would love to do that ... but the truth of the matter is that the Hobby Gaming industry is in rapid decline (due to people preferring to play online games). Ideally, I would consolidate these sites, and redirect my members to another (non-hobby gaming) community and grow something outside of my niche. My member are very loyal ... and I think that if I launched any site that has mass appeal, they would jump on it. I'll let everyone know how it goes. :)

Sounds like you know your stuff! Good luck in whatever you decide to do.:D

How will the community react to the changes ? That should be the first concern. While i agree with chgo, advertising is key, community (content comes with) should come first.

A large merger was done not that long ago with about 50 huge auto forums, complete failure and it resulted in killing some of the communities.

That is true to some extent.

The merger was closer to 9 sites into 1 mega autosite.

It was a complete failure. Unfortunately for some people I know, but alas they sold their sites to said company, took the money and ran.

Regarding killing the communities. I know of 3 that died within days of doing what they did. 2 are getting back to an image of what they were back in the first year of operation. The other, well it is pretty dead.

Shame on the new owners and Kudos to the former owners for getting their money.

Heya Typhon,

I am actually deciding on the same thing at this time, only I am deciding whether I want to start new sites or add them into my existing. I run UltimateMetal.com and have a few "sister sites" I want to start up, such as UltimateHardRock, UltimateProg, etc. - I was going to make them individual sites, but the only reason I haven't yet is I know a lot of the users will use multiple sites, and I was trying to find a way they could have a global user account across all the sites. Only thing I have seen is major hacking to accomplish that, a road I won't go down.

If you look at my Metal site, I already have a lot of individual forums (bands) - if I had the same amount for Hard Rock, Prog, this thing would be more of a monster than it already is. Wasn't sure what I would do from a server standpoint. Currently I just upgraded to quad core Xeon, 4 GB ram, 2 73 GB 15k drives (one for MySQL). Not sure how far that will take me.