Probably already know the answer(s) but want to get other's feedback issues they might see arising. I use IPB 3.2 I came up with an idea for expansion by merging other forums into my own. A lot of baseball officials organizations have a forum as part of their website which is hardly used, but still a good resource for them. 99% of the ones I've seen are free forum software which are on the list to be converted by IPB. My thought is to contact the webmasters of these sites and offer to convert their forums to a special private forum of Umpire-Empire. It would bring me more potential members. It would save forum headaches from the webmasters. Here are my questions. Obviously I can assign a Moderator specifically for those forums, and make the forum private and unseen unless they are a member of that group, but can that Moderator manage their own group's membership or is that something I would have to do? What concerns would you have about having dozens or hopefully if this is successful hundreds, of small private forums within your forum? Also if for whatever reason they are not satisfied, is there a way they could convert only their content back to the forum software of their choice? And if so do other forums charge for converting to them? I would like to offer the possibility that if they are not satisfied with the relationship I will convert them back to what they came from. I am also going to work with my sponsors to come up with incentives to the members of their organization for joining. Thoughts??? Potential landmines???
I'm pretty sure you would have to convert the entire database and then delete the sections they couldn't have before handing over any content that "belonged" to them if they decided merging with you wasn't working out - so I don't think that's a viable path. I'm not really a big fan of merging sites, although I can understand it in some situations. I think for it to stand any possibility of working well, you'd have to take responsibility for the entire thing - add moderators of course, but stipulate that the content would not be transferrable (due to my first point) and that all posters must follow the TOS of the main site as well as any that are specific to each area.
Technically speaking, yes. Members cannot create their own calendars, however you as an Admin can... and you can set up the Permissions so that each group can only access a specific Calendar.
