Question How to handle large forum with many categories/sub-categories

james2581 wrote: Is this the best way to attack this?

In my personal opinion, no. That is not the best way to handle it. You make the assumption that you will have at least 500 people joining your site, each of them from a different city, and that they will all intuitively use your forum in the way that you have described it. In fact, if you took 500 people at random, put them in the same room together and asked them which city they came from, the statistical probability that you would find five people from the same city is greater than 0.5. In other words, there's a 50-50 chance that, if you created less than 100 categories, every new member joining your website would have their needs catered to without having to do anything more. But all of this assumes that you attract a lot of new members and that they're going to provide you with the content to seed your forum and make it grow.

If you create a forum with a plethora of categories and a dozen or so sub-categories under each of those, it's my guess that people would be overwhelmed and your forum will become a virtual desert. Again, that's just my opinion.

It may surprise you to know that the forum, here, at www.kunena.org has a total of 171 sections, categories and sub-categories and every day we spend time moving topics/posts from one category into another. If you're prepared to take on the workload of reviewing everything that's posted on your forum and ensuring those things are properly pigeon-holed then that's fine and that's your choice.

Yes, you can attack your problem in the way you've described it. Can Kunena handle 5000 categories/sub-categories? I would say that K 1.7.1 probably can. I think a more important question is whether you and your users could handle those numbers.

I notice that this topic was placed in our support category. I would ask you to look at the posting guide printed at the top of this page. The questions we are currently discussing are somewhat hypothetical, wouldn't you agree?

fxstein wrote: FYI

Kunena checks permissions once per visit and uses a cached result for all further page views. Only if permissions are changed or the user permissions cache is cleared do we recalculate them.

Using J! 1.7.3 and Kunena 1.7.1 I find this not to be happening. New permissions are added between sessions but not removed if a change is made.

I have private categories for specific user groups, adding a user to a group enables that private forum, however removing the user from that group does not remove access to the private forum.

Only editing the sessions table to remove that category from the users session table record removes that category access.

mwmills: I think we're getting away from the original subject. There may be specific issues associated with your website that involve changes you've made to J! 1.7.3 ACL (and this may have a bearing on the points you've made). Permission changes are also reliant on Joomla session times, Kunena session times and the caching of such things.

If you change a user's permissions so that they can access specific categories or if you revoke those permissions, the addition or revocation of those permissions take effect when a new session is started for that user. If the user is currently logged-in then the permission changes are not noticed. However, if you use the Synchronize Users function, the changes are immediately effective.

Yes, this is not tied to the original subject but to the comment made by fxstein.

In my test case I removed a user group assignment and waited three days before logging on with that user id and the private forum was still made available to me.

After receiving your post, I did a user sync, only clearing the user cache, and the private forums were no longer available.

Check your Joomla and Kunena session time-length settings: make sure they are the same as one another (remember, one is in minutes and the other is in seconds) as well as any caching. I think we may have discussed this elsewhere before. We're off-topic now but, it may be worth a separate topic if you thing there's some benefit to other users. Otherwise, you have your answer.

Hi may I know if there is a limit to the number of categories I can create with the Kunena forum?

Also, if I need to make say 1,000 categories, is there a easier way to make them than to just use the Kunena backend "Category Manger"?

cheers