I am building a website for a charity that has many small 'offices' over the country. Part of the site needs to feature a message board.
The visitors must be able to search for the same board from multiple avenues so for example of an office supporting dementia in a Nottingham could be found
You need to have the structure of category > forum > (if necessary) subforum > topics
so you can't really have multiple ways to get to the same thing. The URL would look like it does on this site
Your biggest problem is likely to be the sheer size of what you're suggesting. It looks like you want multiple conditions or diseases and then each one of those will have multiple locations inside it. You'll have an enormous number of forums and when you get over 1000 (might sound a lot but it will multiply very quickly with your idea) then you'll run in to problems with server load and the ability to just run it in an organised fashion.
We see that kind of idea get mentioned a lot but they rarely actually get made as the size and manageability just doesn't work.
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Thank you for the reply, it is much appreciated especially considering the time of year.
There will be around 200 boards in total once all are created, but we'd expect about 5 separate entry points for each considering the location, condition and other possible structures.
I was hoping to not have to build anything myself and use a popular message board system but I guess it's not something a traditional board system does.
I'll build a custom board using a tagging system, I can then emulate a structure using these tags which will achieve what we want.