Adding a Forum to a Website: Sub-domain?

Forum Moderators: rogerd

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Adding a Forum to a Website: Sub-domain?

Shall I add my forum via a Sub-domain or not?

ThatsBoBo

8:54 pm on Mar 9, 2012 (gmt 0)

Hi everyone,

I believe that one of my more popular sites may benifit by adding a forum.

My topic is broken down into city subdomains, kind of like on eater.com

I have:

MyDomain.com (main entry page where you read general info and select your city)

ny.MyDomain.com
sf.MyDomain.com
dc.MyDomain.com
chicago.MyDomain.com

I'm thinking I may set up ONE forum with a section for each city and three subsections for each city.

In this situation, do you feel it would be best for me to create yet another subdomain for my forum?

forum.MyDomain.com

or

add it in a folder off my root domain?

MySite.com/forum

?

Thanks,

robzilla

9:11 pm on Mar 9, 2012 (gmt 0)

Something to keep in mind is that if your forum takes off, it could become a burden to the server that hosts your main domain. If you host your forum on a subdomain rather than in a subdirectory, it's easier to get a seperate server for the forum alone, and you won't have to change paths.

ThatsBoBo

10:24 pm on Mar 9, 2012 (gmt 0)

robzilla: That's a very good point. Thank you.

thecoalman

8:23 am on Mar 11, 2012 (gmt 0)

Slightly off topic but If you look into phpBB you can set different styles for each forum if you wanted to go that route. You'd only need to maintain custom css file for each subsection even if it were some as simple as different image headers. On the backend it's all the same forum but on the front end you could create the illusion of separate forums since they would be visually different.

ThatsBoBo

12:20 am on Mar 12, 2012 (gmt 0)

Sounds good thecoalman. I'll look into it. Thanks.

ThatsBoBo

7:32 pm on Mar 21, 2012 (gmt 0)

OK, I went ahead and launched the forum.

I'm using Simple Machines.

Users ahve already begun signing up and posting. No spam posts/bots to be seen yet. I'm sure they are on their way...

Panthro

8:06 pm on Mar 21, 2012 (gmt 0)

Oh they will come. But +1 for SMF.

thecoalman

4:06 pm on Mar 24, 2012 (gmt 0)

I'm pretty sure forum spam in large part is just like email spam, they have a list and once you're on the list.....

I've been checking the IP's of registrations against the stopforumspam database. Queries to the database also generate frequency and as a precautionary measure I only drop the ones that have been reported more than three times. In my case it appears the registration goes through but in reality the script just exits. I don't even have a captcha anymore, very few spammer sign ups in months and I haven't had any complaints about not receiving the activation email.