Re: Sub forum or topic?

Posted by GregChapman on Feb 16, 2017; 9:16pm
URL: https://support.nabble.com/Sub-forum-or-topic-tp7597754p7597760.html

In Nabble terminology a "topic" is a message together with any replies to that message. These are held within a forum. Forums can hold both sub-forums and topics. A sub-forum is used to hold a number of topics of a particular type.

You can see an example of this if you look at Nabble's "Free Support" forum. You will see it has a number of sub-forums, (most are  to hold topics in different languages) all of which are "pinned". The majority of items that you see are topics (two of those are pinned).  When you pin a sub-forum or topic you ensure it is presented at the top of the list.

I assume that your forum is to provide for a touring meeting whose general topic will be the same at each location, so like "Free Support" the "Forum" app could be right for you, as questions about the content of the meeting that will apply at all locations will be of interest to those attending at any location. However, people attending at location 1 will probably have no interest in the conference centre or hotel to be used by those attending at location 2, so it will be best to keep those topics in separate sub-forums.

Had this been a forum to handle successive AGMs held at a different location each year, then I might want all posts made to the appropriate location sub-forum and a would adjust user permissions, so that no posts could be made at the top level and all posts had to be made in the appropriate location sub-folder.

For administrators running the second type of forum having a mix of sub-forums and topics could be confusing for  users. For them Nabble provides alternative "applications", such as "Mixed", "Category" and "Board". Each of these presents the posts in slightly different formats, but all are designed to separate sub-forums from topics and ensure that all posts are made within a specific sub-forum.

Some administrators with your one "meeting repeated at several locations" pattern would choose to add a "2017 Campaign" sub-forum to the list of locations sub-forums and then bar posting at the top level, to ensure that any message had to be posted in a specific named sub-forum. This could make it easy to add a "2018 Campaign" sub-forum next year and use the same forum all over again.

If you have any doubt about which application might be best for you, create some sub-forums with a few posts in each and try out the various options at:
Options > Application > Change application type
to see which will suit you best.

I also always recommend that new forum administrators create a second user for themselves, so they can test the effect of the various user permissions that are available at:
Options > Users > Change permissions
Administrators have total control. It's worth reading this post to get an understanding of "User Groups" on Nabble:
http://support.nabble.com/Moderating-free-forum-tp6873076p6873871.html