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!

[gmtalk]

Originally Posted by TSR

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.

[MetalAges]

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.