Bulk board creation

[ehsizzup]

I have to create 1000's of new boards for a pet project of mine.

Currently the board information (name, description, etc) is in an spreadsheet.

What is the best/fastest way to create all these boards? Hopefully there is a way to automate this or cut n' paste.

Thanks in advance.

g.

[Illori]

there is no way to automate this task, and with that many boards i dont know who would want to use that forum.

[ehsizzup]

ignoring your advice as recommended.

[DZComposer]

Thousands of boards? Wow. I don't know the nature of your project, but that number makes me wonder if forum software is really the solution for you. The page will have quite long scrollbars.

If you're committed to using SMF, though, I don't think there's a built-in feature for importing board names from a file. You may have to roll a script to do it, dropping each board into the database using a for each loop. I'm not familiar enough with SMF's db structure to give you any advice on how the SQL should be formatted, though.

[IceXaos]

Can you explain more as to what you are wanting to do?  As said by DZC I am unsure of if you are really wanting forum software to utilize the task at hand.  For a community, you would never use thousands of boards, so I assume you're storing data for easy access, in which you would be able to set up a basic PHP script to handle for you using MySQL.

If you give more detail, maybe we can assist you further.

[ehsizzup]

it's a stock market forum.  each individual stock will have it's own board and general discussion boards.  a topic within a board is not enough.  this seems to be standard procedure for stock market forums.

got a better idea? i'm certainly willing to listen.


g,

[WillyP]

Just out of curiosity... I like to see an example of a forum with thousands of boards...

[DZComposer]

@ehsizzup: Yeah, you'd probably want to look into rolling a script to do that. You'd need to loop through your file and add all needed information into the database using an SQL query.

@WillyP: Largest number of boards I've ever seen on a forum would have to be the Steam forums ( http://forums.steampowered.com/forums/ [nofollow] ). Easily hundreds of boards. They don't run SMF, though. They run vBulletin. Most of the boards are title-only links in a 3-column table, but even then it's a bit of a nightmare to find a specific one without using a browser word search.

[ehsizzup]

SMF is probably not the right tool for the job.

This old dog is not in the mood to learn a new trick, so I've put the project on hold for now.

Thanks for all your input.

[tempster]

I found this old topic about the bulk creation of boards in smf from a data file and was wondering if there is anything new anyone can add.

I use forum software (InvisionPowerBoard, Ikonboard and Discus) as interactive local directories (like Yelp, InsiderPages, CitySearch etc).  Although currently, I have commenting on my boards disabled .  I have converted some of my InvisionPowerBoards to smf although I have not yet put any of the SMF boards in production online.  Is SMF so different from IPB that my directories will cause server overload in SMF?

I am hoping to create new updated directories from scratch in SMF.  It would help a great deal if there was a way to bulk create Forums / Boards for businesses listed in an RSS feed . 

[Illori]

please start a separate topic for your issue, this topic belongs to someone else and is marked solved.