Run multiple forums within same domain?

Installation Hosting
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Is there any way I can set up multiple forums within the same domain?

I’m launching a platform that will host multiple products, so I’d like to separate the forums of each product, but preserve the domain.

Thanks!

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A couple possibilities I can think of. Depends if the products are actually related / have lots of overlapping users, vs. if they’re e.g. totally separate user groups but the forums just happen to be owned by the same parent company.

If they’re related, could make sense to have each product as a category, and use subcategories under those. Could use category permissions so only certain people see certain top level product categories.

Or if you want them as totally distinct forums, probably best to install each forum on a separate subdomain. You wouldn’t have to buy extra domain names but each forum would be separately installed on a subdomain so you’d have e.g. product1.maindomain.com, product2.maindomain.com, and product3.maindomain.com. You could add some kind of shared menu if you want them separate but still interlinked in some way.

For more specific advice would be good to have more detail on what exactly you’re looking to do in terms of how these forums relate to each other, who the users are, etc.

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Hi @bts, thanks for the response.

It’s a gaming platform and we will have different games in different languages, so even though some users could overlap on multiple games, we need features such as the “Latest messages”, “Pin Globally” and “Pin Banner” to be exclusive to the forums themselves.

For example, if game 1 is available in language A and game 2 is available in language B, we don’t want global announcements for game 1 to show up in game 2’s forum as it won’t have any relevancy.

That being the case, would this suggestion be the path?

Or if you want them as totally distinct forums, probably best to install each forum on a separate subdomain. You wouldn’t have to buy extra domain names but each forum would be separately installed on a subdomain so you’d have e.g. product1.maindomain.com , product2.maindomain.com , and product3.maindomain.com . You could add some kind of shared menu if you want them separate but still interlinked in some way.

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Do you mean de.yourdomain.com, en.yourdomain.com and so on? (or en.game1.yourdomain.com?) I don’t know how it would even be possible to have forum.yourdomain.com somehow be different if someone is thinking of a different game.

If it’s really language that you care about, you could have one forum and have people join a group to gain access to categories in whatever language (and game) that they like. It’s a bit confusing because they’d have to know to join the right group, but you could conceivably work that out, especially if all categories required group membership. (But if you did that, then Google couldn’t index anything)

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We have experience hosting forums for big game franchises and we recommend doing one instance per locale/game.

Eg:

That way you can scale instance resources according to how popular is each game in each language.

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That is good, but expensive. :wink:

For companies with smaller budgets it might be OK to start with categories for different games, and subcategories for language within the games.

See also How to structure a multilingual community

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Hi @Falco
I am reading through this older post and am also interested in hosting something similar however I want to make sure it is the same user identity across multiple forums.

What I like about the Discourse Forum is that the different categories can show up in the home page with an image, description and the a number of topic listed (top/latest) (mobile view, also can this be done on desktop? I don’t see it as an option). However when creating sub-categories and when navigating into the parent category the topics are all listed together and loses that overall category, description, topics.

My question is which of the following is able to be self hosted:

  1. Is there a theme that allows the home page to show: Parent Category with image + description + top 5 subcategories → Subcategory with image + description + top 5 topics → List of topics
  2. Multi-site with same user sign on:
    ParentCategoryA.discourse.example.com separate forum discussing Parent Category A
    ParentCategoryB.discourse.example.com separate forum discussing Parent Category B
  3. Forum page support for a different list of categories:
    discourse.example.com/supercategoryA with all categories listed relevant to the Super Category A
    discourse.example.com/supercategoryB with all categories listed relevant to the Super Category B

Thanks in advance

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