Can SMF forums be merged together?

[Andrew]

When I set up my site a few years back (was a YaBB site) I had the not-so-brilliant idea of creating two entirely separate forums (as in two different installations each in its own directory).  I originally thought that users from the one forum wouldn't want to use the other, and vice versa.  This was a mistake, and now that users have established themselves (mostly on one forum) they don't want to use the other one.  Worse still, people are taking established user names and impersonating people on the other forum.

Long introduction... the question is simple: can two forums be merged into one?  If so, is there a way to keep some of the aspects of two separate forums (ie keep some categories on one page and others on another)?  Or perhaps it might be easier (if possible) to share usernames, profiles, cookies, member groups, and member-post-counts but maintain two distinct forums?

Any ideas?

[Tomer]

Well that would generally work if you use the same database and same prefix name, but maybe you'r not allowed, try...

[Andrew]

But wouldn't it be a different database prefix for some things (ie messages, topics, etc.) while the same for others (ie user info)?

[[Unknown]]

It may be possible to merge forums in the future, but currently it is not possible.... well, not really - there are a lot of problems it causes.

-[Unknown]

[Andrew]

Well I figured that.  It seems like the member data and message data are too interconnected to try to separate.  Oh well.