Most effective way of creating large amount of sub-forums

Hi,

We’re looking at implementing discourse into an existing application which has a large userbase broken down into schools at the nationwide level.

In an ideal world, each school with have its own private “sub-forum” of which only users from that school can post, which each sub-forum having approx 3 categories (always the same).

If this setup something thats possible in discourse and if so whats the best way of implementing this assuming there may be thousands of schools/sub-forums?

From an initial look it seems it may be possible to create a group per school and then assign users to the group, but creating thousands of groups via API seems like the wrong approach

Any thoughts appreciated!

Yes, it’s possible (each school could have one category with 3 sub-categories) but you’ll have huge performance issues if you create thousands of categories.

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I suspect that you might want to use a multisite install and have each school have its own forum via multisite. The particulars of how you’d manage thousands of multisite forums is likely beyond the kind of help that you can get here.

Are you planning to authenticate against SSO against something?

And you want one group per school? Is this just for teachers and not students?

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This is actually easy to do if you write a little Ruby script to update the PostgreSQL database directly.

It’s not necessary to use an API to do this “relatively straightforward” DB query scripting task using Ruby.

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