Subforums used as filter level

[SoHelpMe]

I was wondering if there was a concept supported by vbulletin as follows….

Lets just say I have a forum about camping, I would like to have subforums below it that were as follows General, Idaho, North Dakota, South Dakota. When a user came into the forum before selecting any subforum I would like the list of posts below the subforums to be an aggregate/combination of all subforums because at that level users would be looking to read all posts about camping regardless of what subforum (General or a State forum) the thread is in. I would then expect that if a user wanted to read only about North Dakota then they would click on the North Dakota sub forum and see only those threads.

Said another way if you had a forum called 1.0 with sub forums , 1.1, 1.2, 1.3, 1.4 basically I would not intend for users to post directly into 1.0 but I would like for users to see all the posts from , 1.1, 1.2, 1.3, 1.4 combined at this level. If a user wanted to see posts from forum 1.3 alone then they would click on 1.3 to do so.

Another good example case for wanting to do this is what if I had a forum about recipes, subforums would be for what country is the country of origin for the recipe, Greece, France, Italy, Mexico, Unknown. Some users will want to view all recipes so I would like for the parent forum to show the combination of all the subforums. Other users will like to look for say an Italian recipe so they would click down into the Italy subforum to see only Italian recipes. Basically I want to use subforums as a way to add an organized filter level but I also want to see combined results as well. Please let me know if this is supported or if there is a mod that might help me do this.

Thanks.

[Lynne]

I would suggest you use Thread Prefixes for this instead of sub-forums. So, create a set of Thread Prefixes (General, Idaho, North Dakota, South Dakota) and make them required in that forum (Forum Manager > Require Threads to have a Prefix > Yes). Then, install a modification like this one - Make Prefixes Clickable to Filter Forumdisplay - so that users may click on a prefix and only see threads with that specific prefix.