[BSMedia]

Originally Posted by Taragon

Let me rephrase that a little bit, by giving an example:

When you categorize your files on your harddrive, you often place all of your files in a directory first. Or when you have a numerous amount of files in several subdirectories. This all to avoid mixture with other files already there.

Now, let's say you don't have any other files to worry about. Why put it in a subdir then?

This same goes for search engines crawling your website. They prefer to go to [minicode]http://mypage.com/forum-title/thread-title[/minicode] instead of [minicode]http://mypage.com/some-dir-name-which-will-only-be-used-once/forum-title/thread-title[/minicode].

I agree, I am perhaps overstating things as there are more important things to worry about like content. However, when seeing a starting website I do think it should be mentioned as it will be almost impossible to do in the future.

Sorry it doesn't work like that. Folders are for organizational purposes and should be used to declare different parts of a web site. Forums should be placed into a forums folder. Don't build your site for the moment, think months down the road and you'll eventually want a front page on the site possibly even a blog (preferably). The blog should be the main part of the site to post articles to and draw users in (in the site root). Then to keep things neat and clean the forums should be placed in a /forums folder to declare they are a seperate but equally important part of the site.

Hence the reason, thousands, upon thousands of forums are installed in a subfolder/subdomain of the actual domain. Unless of course the forum is the only part of the website