Possible for users to create sub forums?

[jcm99]

Hello all,

I am not sure if this can be done. So open to suggestions....

The forum is about music, and we'd need a single forum [and its subs] to have some special functionality. I hope all this makes sense. If not I'll try to clarify... Thanks in advance.

schema:
top level / a / artist name / song

Which I think would best translate to:
category / category / forum / thread

The idea is that visitors could subscribe to a forum (artist) that they like and then be updated if there are new songs posted, or updates to an existing song thread.

The challenge is that there will be a lot of artist forums (hence the need for a/b/c categories). We are looking at thousands.

Is there any way for a user to be able to create a new "artist" forum? This would have to be aside from the other forums housing the usual general discussion, off topic, etc.

Thanks,
John

 

[Paul B]

Forums can only be created by administrators in the ACP.

 

[jcm99]

Yeah, figured that was the case... but you know 'if you dont ask, you never know'.

So what would you suggest is the best workaround? A form filled out by the end user that is sent to the administrators?

 

[arn]

This seems like it will be a mess. And there’s no way people are going to stick to the thread = song thing. Will u be ok if people post random chit chat threads under an artist?

Seems like there could be a better way, maybe through a structured tagging or prefix system.

 

[jcm99]

The system we are looking to replace is very messy. http://ignition.customsforge.com. I am open to ideas. Where can I read more about structured tagging and prefixes?

 

[frm]

Way too many nodes and prefixes (for artists) would have to be created for artist/song. I'd stick to genre/sub genre.

Then allow for users to post whatever.

Heavy moderation would be required, but mods edit the titles to Artist - Song and place in genre, if not there, with appropriate tags as seen fit.

Disable editing tags of own threads and titles for the author and then you have a structurally clean forum.

Play with the demo more as all I outlined can be achieved there.

 

[frm]

Or, admins/mods could only create threads and no worries about users posting whatever just to be edited. Just allow them to reply to precreated threads.

Allow threads to be made in a suggestion forum (private) then you create the main thread for them.

 

[arn]

So it's a game? Is there a limited set number of songs that exist? I was picturing you were saying any song in the world would be allowed.

 

[sbj]

Okay, this is right up in my alley.

First of all, you can forget the idea of having hundreds of nodes. XF is designed in a way that with each node the forum gets slower because it makes permission checks. Having 1000 nodes would slow down your forum massively. You would hate to have that.

What you can do is this: you will put everything under 1 single node. There is no other better way to do this. I encountered the same problem.
The solution to the mess is this addon: Thread Filter by @AddonsLab

What you will have to do is to create a dropdown custom thread field like "artist name" and put all the names in that one field.
Then you create for each artist a thread and save each thread the correct field.
Now thanks to the addon all people will be able to filter out the threads based on the artist they are interested in.

About the subscribing thing. There are 2 ways I can think of how you can do this.

1) If you create for each artist a thread, and allow for each message of a thread to be a song, then people just have to subscribe to the thread of an artist. And everytime there is a new post in the thread, which will be a new song, they will be alerted.
But of course this way there won't be any discussion going on as each post can only be a song to have a clean thread.
But you can link in first post to a "discussion" thread and point the visitors to that thread, if they want to discuss. There is also another addon I can suggest about this (Link Threads by @truonglv ), which makes linking of threads great. You just put in another custom thread field a thread url, and now Artist A Songs Thread <=> Artist A Discussion Thread link to each other automatically.

2) The other alternative would be, instead of having a single thread for each artist with the right custom thread field, you can allow for each song of any artist to be a thread in a single node. Let's say Artist A has 10 songs. You could let all 10 songs to have their own 10 threads and all of course have the Artist A saved as custom thread field. So people can filter again with the addon above quickly and find all songs. This way is good because now people can have a discussion for each song because each song has its own thread. They can subscribe to each song, but there is no way to subscribe to an artist to see updates. Unless you create also an artist thread along the songs. So they can subscribe to the artists' thread like in 1) but also there would be threads for each song. But this way you have more work, as you have to create threads for each song AND update artists thread so people get notified.

2b) Solution could be to use an addon like this Keyword Alert, however not sure how good this addon works. And also not sure how many people would use that to set individually keywords for themselves (like artist name) and everytime the name is mentioned it will alert them.

 

[beerForo]

Another option may be Social Groups

Social Groups (XenForo 2.x.x)

This add-on has excellent features and friendly UI. It is compatible with most versions of XenForo (2.0.x). Key features: Ability to create unlimited categories and nested categories for groups. Ability to create unlimited custom fields for...

xenforo.com

Example: An Aerosmith group. Categories for albums. Threads for songs.