Howto: Create Forum Subdirectories as Categories

[scripter]

I was visiting a site, http://city-data.com, (using vbulletin) and noticed they have a setup similar to the following:

forum/city1
forum/city2
forum/city3
forum/some-other-city-directory

What I found interesting was each city listed above was part of the same forum but was in a sub directory to the forum itself. Their archive link was huge! I was trying to do something similar:

forum/2008/0501
forum/2008/0502
forum/2008/0503
forum/etc

where the date listed above is a category with forums underneath. I just can't can't get it to work. What I'd like to do is have registration setup so everybody can register in the forum and have access to each day of the month which in turn is a separate directory.

Is city-data.com using a hack or am I missing something obvious? I tried setting the Forum Link in the admin panel to forum/2008/0501 (the path actually exists in the directory structure) but that doesn't work for what I'm trying to do.

Any ideas?

[Jake Bunce]

I am not sure I understand what you want, but I think you might want this:

Admin CP -> vBulletin Options -> Forum Listings Display Options

You can adjust your forum depths here to hide forums of a certain depth.

[scripter]

Thanks, Jake. That's not what I'm looking for, or I don't believe it is.

I think the easiest way to describe what I'm looking for is to show you. Take a look at this link:

http://www.city-data.com/forum/

Then mouse over the forums on the page and your browser should show you the actual path to the forums. For Alabama, the forum path is:

http://www.city-data.com/forum/alabama/

The forum for Alaska is here:

http://www.city-data.com/forum/alaska/

How do you configure vbulletin to include subdirectories/folders in the forum as city-data has done above? I don't know how else to describe it but I'd like to have one login for multiple forums as described above.

As far as I know the Forum Listings Display Options are not what I'm looking for.

[Jake Bunce]

They are probably using mod_rewrite in a htaccess file to do that. The vBSEO addon does that:

http://www.vbseo.com/

That site might be running vBSEO.

[scripter]

Thanks. I'll check vBSEO out.