Help Designing a Multi-Community Site
 

Hi,

I run a successful community bulletin board using VB 3.6. I'd like to extend the board to handle multiple communities.

A key requirement is that I want users to be able to see a global forum (across all communities) and their local community forum, but not other community specific forums. Something along the lines of Craigslist where they have local classified ad and site-wide discussion forums (that suck!)

I'd also like any searches to only find posts the global or in their local-specific forum.

VB's forum hierarchy doesn't cut it so I'm looking at other ways of implementing this.

I'm thinking of using Private Forums, which seems to be an under used feature of VB.

The idea being having the global forum being public and the local forums being private. This seems like it would do the trick but the interface sucks so that would need to be redesigned.
Un-registered users would see the global forum and all the local forums. Once they are registered, they would choose their local forum during their registration process and it would register them for that "private" forum.

There would also need to be an easy way of viewing other communities, perhaps with a combo box. When viewing an alternate community they would have an option to make that their home community instead (loading that when returning to the site, change default email subscriptions etc.).

A different skin could be loaded depending on the current community that is loaded.

How does all that sound to you? Do you think it would work? Do you have any other ideas? Is there a pluggin that would help? Are you interested in doing custom coding?

EDIT: Would 3.8 social groups do the trick, or any other 3.8 features?
Thanks!
Barry

This is what I would do, but I don't know if it'd be exactly what you're looking to do.

Let's say you're looking to have 3 different communities.

Board A - Global
Board B - Community 1
Board C - Community 2
Board D - Community 3

Create 3 joinable usergroups. Usergroup 1-3.

Set Board A to be able to be seen by everyone.
Set Board B to only be seen if you're in group 1.
Set Board C to only be seen if you're in group 2.
Set Board D to only be seen if you're in group 3.

I'm not sure, but I would think that's pretty close to what you're looking for...

Thanks BlueNG, that's what I tried to explain in my post. Good, at least one other person thinks that's the way to go! Any other comments/ideas?