UBB.Developers Forums UBB.threads 7 Development How Do I? Shared forums: is it possible?

we finally decided on the php version of the software. As some of you can gather from the title of this post, I'm curious to know if there is a way to share a forum. I took the obvious route but the message came up saying that I cannot assign the same number to more than one forum or category. However, that doesn't mean taht what I want to do isn't possible. The reason for the shared forums is because I will have several city listings, each city on it's on page with the board, but I have an "administrator" forum on each page as well. If I have an announcement I want to be able to post it once and leave it be instead of posting the same message on each city and page. Hope that made sense. Any ideas?

Not quite sure I understand what you are trying to do. Can you explain a bit more? Or maybe someone else can see what I'm missing[]/testimages/icons/wink.gif[/].

I'll try to explain: I am going to run a site in which it is necessary to have a choice between several different cities, depending on your city of interest. I'll run it off either a virtual server or a dedicated server so I can accomplish my goal in having a board for each city (will involve running several different copies of the software on my site) via a pull down menu on the main page. If I don't do that then all the forums and categories will show up on the same page and I don't want that. Besides, apparently we don't have unlimited categories - a necessity for my site with all the different city listings. The boards will all look the same no matter which city you select meaning all will have the same forums for the most part; the only thing that's really different are the people in those cities, and the topics that concern that city and area. Like I said, putting my site on a virtual server (at least) is better for my site so people don't have to page through a long list of categories and forums on the same page. Anyway, there will be one forum, the administrator forum where the administrator can make announcements for downtime, maintenance, answer policy questions, etc. which I would like to "share" with all the other city listings so I don't have to post the same announcment 90 times. If it's a shared forum, I can post once and the same message shows up in the forum in all cities for everyone to read. To do this the forum needs to have the same number assigned to it but wwwthreads does not allow me to do that. I figured there must be a way around that, a software loophole of some sort. I hope that was a more thorough explaination of what I'm after.

Scream, bascially, I thought BeanBag want a feature that allow authorized users posting a cross-board message. It might be something like what the Usenet newsgroup cross-post threads worked.

Maybe a list menu displayed when authorized and the user can then have an option to post a carbon-copy (not exactly a COPY duplication but loading from the the same message from the database) message and choose which board to make a carbon-copy.

Moreover, I though it would be much better if there were co-administrators that will only have privilieges to the forum (contains categories & boards) they've authorized to managed.

So this would just like a big community site with many user clubs/forums (small communities). Each club have its own master. Maybe like what Yahoo Clubs was working.

Actually to do this, the forums would all need to have the same keyword but each one would need a different Bo_Cat and Bo_CatName. This might be possible, but would take some trickery to achieve.

Basically, to test if this will work you can follow these steps:

You will need to create your main announcements forum just like normal. For this example I will assume you gave this forum the Keyword of "announcements". Next you will need to create another forum in a different category, give it a different Keyword but the same description as the first one. I will assume you gave this forum the keyword of "temporary".

After this you can go into the admin area, and into the database manager. From here you will want to do the following sql command:

UPDATE w3t_Boards SET Bo_Keyword='announcements' WHERE Bo_Keyword='temporary'

At this point you should have 2 duplicate forums in 2 different categories and whatever you post in one should appear in the other.

I don't use the PHP version, but why don't you create each city board with it's own category, and this will give you jumper boxes on each board that contain the board for that city. Then create your Announcements board in an altogether separate category. And just create one Announcements board. Now go into the code where the jumper box is created with the select options for each board in that category and hard code a select line for the Announcements board. Now it will show up in the jumper box for every category/city.

Just my $0.02