Main forum with chapter forums on other sites

[Thanster]

I just joined a large non-profit and I am charged with expanding our online communities. We have a current forum which I want to convert to vBulletin but I want to do another thing which is kind of unique. Our non-profit manages the individual websites of the 150 regional chapters of our organization. (they are located on sub-domains off our main site, and on the same physical server) I would like to have a regional forum for discussion of topics relevant to that region appear on each of the chapter sites while using the same back end as our main forum. I also want someone browsing the main site forum to be able to see all of the regional forums. I don’t really want to have to maintain 150 copies of vBulletin and I want to be able to centralize all of the moderation. Is this something vBulletin can do?

[poolking]

You could create subforums for each of the chapters and everyone would be able to see all of the forums from the forum homepage.

[nexialys]

a good example on how to split your forum into chapters is by visiting the christian site in my signature... 3rd biggest forum on the internet, you can see that we have split a lot of forums into sections and categories...

this is easily done with vBulletin...

[Thanster]

Perhaps I wasn't clear. I have managed another vBulletin site for the past 6 years and I understand all aspects of subforums and categories.

Here's what I am trying to do:

My organization has its main site and forum area located at x.org (where x is the name of the organization.)

We have a network of chapters located in different regions such as:

DelMarVa http://DelMarVa.x.org
South Central Indiana http://scihra.x.org
Greater Baton Rouge http://gbr.x.org
Southwestern Iowa http://swiowa.x.org
West Michigan http://hrgwmi.x.org
Northwest CT http://nwcthra.x.org
Centre Co. http://hracc.x.org

I want to have a way that each of those subdomains can have access to one of the subforums on the main forum (located on x.org) for a regional discussion.

[peterska2]

Setting up your forums to run on separate subdomains like that will require multiple licenses as each subdomain will be a separate instance of vBulletin.

[nexialys]

redirecting each sub-domain to a sub-forum is permitted without any need to buy a license... you just have to set the proper urls, but rememberthat once insidethe forum structure, they will see the same site... you can't have seperate sections blocked from others, that would mean a different site, not only a different sub-forum.