Split a forum across domains?

Can you unify disparate forums?

[anallawalla]

I am trying to tie together several disparate websites (different stakeholders but same ultimate owner) who all have small forums with little activity and tell them to send their users to a common forum that will have all their topics.

The sites might not be excited with this idea as they may see it as potentially losing traffic to the rest of their pages. Unifying their separate websites is not an option, as they are separate business units. I am just looking at the forums.

Is it possible to have a single instance of forum software that will allow the different sites to display an entry page that looks like a forum index? I would prefer not to use frames.

How would you tackle this?

[bill]

You want the same forum on 2 or more domains? If the forum was on a sub-domain like this:

forum.example.com
forum.example.net

Then you could use a CNAME and alias one domain to another.

If you can't make one forum the central one then maybe a new forums-only domain could be registered and all traffic forwarded there.

[anallawalla]

Thanks for the reply. Yes, I want a new domain for the forum. The subdomain idea is also worth considering.

[thecoalman]

If having them on the same domain is not an issue phpbb3 can do that. You can apply different themes to different forums, a forum can have sub-forums....

For example you could have the main page be a directory for all the forums. Once they enter the other forum you'd have a different theme. The user is going to cue onto the visual appearance and to them it would appear to be separate. You're still using the same user database and it would certainly save a lot of grief as far as administration.

If you wanted to allow the forum "owner" the ability to grant or deny access to their forum you could set up a usergroup for each forum the users would have to join to get access. The groups have a "leader" who would be able to grant or deny them permission.