Automated Post in forum

[Amitsah]

I have a website for school ranking in India and i am willing to install a forum to handle the user questions regarding schools.
there are more than 7000 schools in our directory and time by time(once or twice every year mostly) schools will increase in number.
Before we install vbulletin products i wish to know that will it be possible to create automated category and subcategory and then some starter post

Like
Category -- State Name
Sub Category - District Name
Posts -- School Name

For example for a School url on website
Study Hall School
Here are requirments

Category -- Uttar Pradesh
Sub Category -- Lucknow
Post -- Study Hall

And then parents would be able to post request in that particular post.
We are using php and mysql.
All school name state and district information is already there in database.

Please let me know if it can be done

[Replicant]

Populating categories, subcategories and threads can be scripted in version 5 although it has to be custom coded for each individual circumstance. I have not done it on any other version, but I imagine it is possible. Maybe some of the others have thoughts on ver 3 or 4. I think 7000 individual forums/categories could cause a performance issue for ver 5 at least. One usergroup per forum, that is a lot of usergroups as well. Version 3 may be better suited for this size of forum due to it's lower overhead if it's even possible. Are you migrating from another forum platform or building one from scratch?

[Amitsah]

No, Not migrating it.
It will be a new forum.I understand that it will require script, but i was wondering if someone has developed such script and can be used with minor changes.

May be disabling some features can help performance.

[BirdOPrey5]

7000 individual forums is too many (in practice) for VB5. I would recommend 100 or less forums for VB5.

For VB3 and VB4 it should be fine but I'm not aware of any existing script to create forums.

[abdelhamed]

i have website, i want create a forum and linked it to my website and my members taken action to
my forum.
when i do this, my website will loss rank? and how i do this?
thanx

[BirdOPrey5]

Hello,

I don't believe adding a forum to an existing site would cause you to lose page rank so long as you kept spam and undesirable content off your forum.

If your site uses PHP and MySQL you can likely purchase a vBulletin 5 license from www.vbulletin.com and install VB4 or VB5 on your site.

It would be your responsibility to customize the look of the forum (if you wish to) to make it blend in with your existing site.