[Forum] maximal number of sub forums

[ches]

I have a website that provides 1-hour short courses.
For all new courses, I intend to create a subforum (1 for each course) for users to discuss the course contents.
I would like to restrict access to this subforum only to users who have purchased this course (not the problem)


However, I have read that more than 2000 subforums will be a problem, and I anticipate that eventually, there will be more than 2000 subforums needed (in ~2-4yrs time).
I do not anticipate any subforum to have any more than 10-20 threads with any more than ~20-30 posts per thread, with each subforum sustaining a short term peak of users (total of 50-200 users per course, possibly more in the long term)


1) Is it viable to use subforums in the long term?
2) Will 10,000 subforums be an issue given the light load per subforum? …or even more for the longer term. (i just dont want to think I am setting myself up for a death trap)
3) are there other ways to implement this result without the use of subforums?

[Wayne Luke]

You're not going to reuse courses over the years? Just not sure about the concept as I don't understand how you can do 10,000 courses at once. Even a full-fledged four year University isn't going to run 10,000 courses at once.

[ches]

these are 1 hour educational videos, not 4 year university courses
2000 is more realistic than 10000 in the medium term (2-4years), though I say 10000 for a safety buffer.
there are 1-4 new videos per week (at the moment) and yes, the old videos can all be accessed at any time, though there is minimal traffic to older videos.

though this is beside the point...which is: is this sub forum structure viable or is there an alternative?

[Andy]

From what I understand vbulletin is not designed with so many forums or subforums. The result would be a forum which runs very slow.

Here's an idea that might work for you. Have a single forum that contains all the course threads. Identify each thread with the course number at the beginning of the thread title. In order for this to work you would need to do the following:

1) Be able to display threads by the course number. A custom script can be created to do this. Make sure this script only displays threads to those members that have paid for the course. This script can have a checkbox which would only display threads created by the user too.

2) Prevent viewing the course forum directly, require the member to use the script as described above.

3) Make sure any new thread created has the course number at the beginning of the title. This requires modifying the php files.

[Wayne Luke]

these are 1 hour educational videos, not 4 year university courses
2000 is more realistic than 10000 in the medium term (2-4years), though I say 10000 for a safety buffer.
there are 1-4 new videos per week (at the moment) and yes, the old videos can all be accessed at any time, though there is minimal traffic to older videos.

though this is beside the point...which is: is this sub forum structure viable or is there an alternative?

Well it matters because I have to know how you are planning on using it to provide a solution.

You need at least forums X usergroups X 20 bytes memory for the forum permissions cache. So if you have 10,000 subforums and 10,000 usergroups accessing those subforums you need at least 2,000,000,000 bytes per page load to hold the memory. That is just about 2 GB of RAM per page load.

This is where the problem comes in because there is a lot more stuff that needs to be loaded into memory to build that page.

If it were me, I would look into using Social Groups for each course and consolidating the courses in some way. Having a forum for a single video and its comments is not efficient.

[Amaury]

You could also just add prefixes.

[Wayne Luke]

You could also just add prefixes.

That is an option but there are no permissions on Prefixes so people wouldn't be prevented from viewing the videos.

[Andy]

You could also just add prefixes.

It would be impractical to use the prefix system because a drop down with 2000 options is not UI friendly.

[John Lester]

Why not group the courses with main forums by month and use sub forums for that months courses? If you're going to have new courses next year, create a year category to stick the main month forums under. That way you have 12 main forums, with 30ish sub forums at most per given forum. With 360ish sub forums per year and you should be fine.

Alternatively have you considered using stickies under similar set up as I mentioned instead of sub forums?