Lack of interest Elegantly Handle Large Numbers of Forums

[Greg]

This is a bit of an abstract suggestion (as in, I don't really know how to make it better, but I know there's a better way out there). Often times, as forums grow larger, they add more forums. Many admins utilize subforums as a way of keeping their index orderly, but this can cause their site to grow into a confusing labrinyth in order to find the content. Others keep everything at top level, and their index stretches down for miles. There has to be some way to handle this elegantly, right?

A couple possible ideas I was playing with were favourite forums (so users can mark the forums they care about to show up top), tabbed navigation (so only one category is displayed at a time), sub-categories (showing nested forums on the index, but collapsible), and even forums of forums (the subforums are listed as threads within a 'category' forum). This is not really a suggestions thread for any of them in particular, but more of a call for people who know more about creating forums than I do to think about adding something.

 

[Waddy]

Would be interesting to see how new navigation ideas might work. I like the idea of marking forums as favourites to appear at the top of the page.

I've seen a couple of vB forums with tabs before and personally I wasn't a fan of them, it fragmented the site too much and meant the hidden forums weren't as active, so I'd be a bit more sceptical of any solutions that require hiding forums.

 

[kmike]

I also hope that having a large number of forums wouldn't be a performance hit like it's now in vBulletin.
See for example this issue where our own Mike S. says:

The forum cache is roughly F*U (+C*F), where F = forums, U = usergroups, and C = some constant size. It's not optimized for the case of lots of forums and lots of usergroups.

I hope XF will only fetch and process forum list when really necessary.

 

[Brandon_R]

xenForo is yet to implement a cache system. if it runs fast now, imagine how fast it will run with the cache system

 

[Forsaken]

I also hope that having a large number of forums wouldn't be a performance hit like it's now in vBulletin.
See for example this issue where our own Mike S. says:

I hope XF will only fetch and process forum list when really necessary.

Fairly sure they took this into account when they built XenForo from the ground up.

Most of shortcomings from vBulletin are probably not even remotely going to hinder XenForo it seems. 

 

[Brandon_R]

Fairly sure they took this into account when they built XenForo from the ground up.

Most of shortcomings from vBulletin are probably not even remotely going to hinder XenForo it seems.

That's the best part of new competition. It's hard to change the ways of old competition but with xenForo being a new player in the game, they can look at the flaws of the competition and fix them

 

[kmike]

Fairly sure they took this into account when they built XenForo from the ground up.

Most of shortcomings from vBulletin are probably not even remotely going to hinder XenForo it seems.

Now that Xenforo is out, can anyone comment if it is indeed able to handle the large number of forums well?