Creating a Mega Forum

Installation
1

Please consider this a feasibility study for a project I would like to implement asap.

I need to verify that Discourse is the resources I need for the creation of a “Super Forum”: the basics outlined below. I would appreciate any suggestions, thoughts, and/or criticism you have that will enable the creation of a forum capable of being accessed by millions of people daily.

  1. Visitor’s first view of the site is a page containing links to five, possibly more, categories. Actions: Links to Register, Logon, (Registered users access to their subscriptions page), jump to destination (with auto complete) or search for destination (with auto complete)

  2. Visitor selects from one of the categories to bring up a page containing more then four sub-categories. Actions: Register, Logon, (Registered users access to their subscriptions page), jump to destination (with auto complete) or search for destination (with auto complete)

  3. Visitor selects one of the sub-categories which would bring up a page of forums which may expand to over a thousand. Actions: Register, Logon, (Registered users access to their subscriptions page), jump to destination (with auto complete) or search for destination (with auto complete)

  4. Visitor selects a forum that brings up a page of sub-forums numbering in the thousands. Actions: Register, Logon, (Registered users access to their subscriptions page), jump to destination (with auto complete) or search for destination (with auto complete)

  5. Visitor selects sub-forum and, when viewing or posting has the option to add this destination to their subscriptions. Actions: Register, Logon, (Registered users access to their subscriptions page), jump to destination (with auto complete) or search for destination (with auto complete)

This tree will surely need to be refined and most likely expanded beyond what I’ve shown but, if I’m successful, this will be the most massive forum on the planet and once in operation will require all the support I can get.

Mobile users are expected to be the most involved so I’m attempting to make it easy for first time visitors to find their interest and for members to reach their destination quickly through their subscriptions.

Forming a site of this scale, I am aware, is not the recommended course but for this project to succeed, it’s the exception to the rule.

Other forum packages don’t have the capability to work with a project of this scope.

Another option could be a contained multi-forum with a common shared database containing all the members information, profiles and subscription linked to the database for each of the forum categories, it’s sub-categories, forums, sub-forums all contents and post threads.

A simple example:

A food forum: (All types of: Nuts, Grains, Cereals, Vegetables, Fruits, Juices, Dairy (including all cheese, types of milk, cream, half & half yogurt, etc), all types of Meat and Meat Products, all types of Seafood fresh and salt water) and fish products, Breads, Deserts, Drinks (alcoholic and non-alcoholic) Preparation, Recipes, etc etc etc.

First Category: Nuts (over 50 varieties)

First Topic: Raw Nuts (all nuts that are available raw, preparation, recipes, etc)

Second Topic: Sliced Nuts (all nuts that are available sliced, recipes, etc)

Third Topic: Roasted Nuts (all nuts that are available roasted, recipes, etc)

Can you imagine the number of topics needed to cover everything?

My forum won’t be about food… It will be about everything that affects people in one country: Considerably more complex then my simple food example.

As I’ve illustrated, the flat format, shows that this one element, makes this format quite unwieldy.

For further details or information please let me know.

1 Like
2

Bear in mind that Discourse supports only 2 levels of category: category and sub-categories.

3

Thanks for taking the time to respond Régis.

I did not come across any examples of Sub-categories so I thank you for bringing it to my attention.

So I’m limited to multiple Categories each of which can be the parent of many Sub-categories and each Sub-category contains as many Topics as needed: This would quickly become unwieldy and would be abandoned by the users.

Are there any further options available for my project with Discourse?

4

It sounds like the amount of compartmentalization you’re describing would be unwieldy no matter how you go about it.

But perhaps Tagging would work?

5

Well, we’re considering this feature request:

Which could essentially be used to achieve one extra level of categorisation. However…

I think this would probably suit you much better. In our experience, some compartmentalisation is good for communities, for the same reason we sub-divide countries up in states & cities.

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