One forum, multiple sites

[Lobtec]

Hi,

We have one forum on a good size poker portal today. We also have sites for odds/sport and casino. Now we are planing on starting a forum for the sport portal first, and perhaps other sites later.
I was thinking about trying to share forums with the poker portal. This will make it easier to get the new forum started and cross promote sport and poker. In order to avoid duplicate content one could use robots (or somehting like that) so the poker portal just shows the poker-forums, and the same thing with the sport portal.

Have anyone tried this before? Or have any thoughts about if its a good or bad idea? We are currently using phpbb but am open to switch.

[Jeremy]

So basically have multiple sites sharing the same forum / DB? I have thought about this in the past but the major concern is duplicate content and brand confusion.

Interesting thread for sure.

[Lobtec]

The brand issue is one thing. I think you can get around this with being quite open about sharing the forums. Perhaps naming and dividing the sub-forums properly. Also, going with two different templates and integrates the forums into the site should help.

Perhaps something to try with PAL when you start GAL and CAL

If one set up robots.txt properly, you should be good with the duplicate content problem, right?

[Trikkur]

I think this would work really well if all of your sites were branded. Such as XYZPoker, XYZCasino, XYZSportsbook, etc. Then if they all shared it would make a lot of sense and have insane amounts of traffic.

[pokerprop]

My recommendation would be separate forums that shared the same database for user names, passwords, post counts all that stuff but have the content unique to the particular site. Feed the latest posts from other forums that the same user name can be used for various different spots on each forum (interlinking them)