Serious Forum Design Issue [closed]

Question

I want to launch a school forum for a country. I'm in dilemma as to how to design this forum.

Country will have many states, each state will have cities, each city will have many schools. Each school will have many classes( 1st - 12th).

It looks like this:

States -> Cities -> Schools -> Classes

I want to make each class as forum.

Now the biggest problems are two fold:

1. If I were to list even 1000 schools it will create huge number of forums and I don't think forum softwares(PHPBB, MyBB) are designed to support these many
2. Secondly creating and maintaining huge forums is also very difficult. Ideally I'd like to duplicate existing forum hierarchy to new one.

I've done lot of search and I've found that such type of forums are infeasible and such designs don't work. Leave alone the fact the nobody uses such a forum.

Keeping in mind this, how should I go about designing this forum?

Answer 1

Well I'm sure vBulletin, or phpBB can handle 1000 forums easily. You can view some of the largest forums on the web here http://www.big-boards.com/ and see that there are forums with hundreds of thousands of replies posts etc.

The problem I see is if you have a parent forum with the country name, sub forums for states, sub forums for cities, sub forums for schools, and further broken down into classes. You are going to have visitors leaving because it takes too long to get to the forum they are look for.

You may want to setup your primary domain as the country, and sub folder as a state such as http://www.example.com/new-york/bayridge/school-name/

BuddyPress is a good option to create a large blog where students, teachers, and parents could create their own blogs. Then with categories, and tags you could manage the content a bit easier I think. This depends on what type of content you plan to have or if you plan to just let everyone post their own topics, then BuddyPress would be ideal to let them create their own blog, BuddyPress also can support a forum. Check out the forums on WordPress.org

Forums are quite a bit old though even with registering with Facebook or Twitter it's still a pain to follow threads. With BuddyPress you could integrate with Facebook Comments so people could comment without having to login to your website. I see many news websites doing this to let people in the community reply to their articles quicker.

Last, before you worry about maintaining a huge forum, blog or community first build it, then get traffic. Worry about maintenance when you have to. The reality is you will not have every student in all schools signing up to your site.

Answer 2

You could customize http://www.question2answer.org/ to support this type of functionality. Probably a lot better solution than a forum. Forums are old school, question / answer scripts like this one are the future.