Integrating with Forums

[tommythejoat]

I have Vault Wiki set up and can associate a namespace with a forum. However, we have a number of topical forums and I would like to have wiki's for each of them that appear as subforums at the top of the discussion area.

If I create subforums under the top level forum I set up for Default, may I then map each of these to a different vBulletin Forum as a subforum? If the answer is yes, how is auto linking managed. Are all of the subforums still in the common default namespace? I.e. if I have an article on "precision machining" in the subforum to the main forum Clocks and someone refers to precision machining in the main forum Watches, will an autolink be created?

My clock collectors only occasionally look at my watch forums and vice versa. I would like for each of them to have a handy wiki subforum in their own forum space.

What I have described is how I imagine it to work, but I am hesitant to do a lot of experimenting when someone could just tell me the answer.

[pegasus]

You cannot assign a subforum to a different display forum other than the one for the top of the namespace (this would create too many problems with inheritance).

To do what you are considering, you can either:

1. Create Island wiki forums as subforms of your "watch" forums for example. Autolinking will not occur because you need to know the full URL to link to these.
2. Create subforums (non-wiki) of your "watch" forums, and use vBulletin's Forum Link to forward these to your actual topical wiki forums.
3. Enable forum headers in your "watch" forums. Create a forum header from the "watch" forum that mentions helpful wiki articles and provides the links. This is what forum headers were originally intended for.

[tommythejoat]

OK, if I use the vBulletin redirect and have Watch and Clock subforums in Default (id = wiki), then autolinking will occur from the watch and clock main forums to any article in the default tree either watches or clocks. Of course if someone who know what they are doing creates a link, they should use the WIKI bb Code to create it.

The autolinking is really intended to be an "autoanswer" service once the article space starts to fill up. It presumably will be useful to newcomers when they reread their post and see the links there.

Does the software need any notice that the article is in a subforum or is that aspect invisible to linking and autolinking?

[pegasus]

The subforum aspectry should be invisible. However, autolinking only occurs within articles to other articles in the same namespace (that don't redirect back there); and in regular posts only to articles in the default namespace.

[tommythejoat]

I think we will be promoting the idea that someone can use a HELP tag to ask what something means when they are making a post. Then we will populate the HELP namespace with brief glossary information which in turn will contain links to longer articles when appropriate.

All the regular articles will be in the default namespace now that I have sorted out how that will work. We will be using the subforum structure to navigate to the default namespace from our existing topical forums.

It is my hope that this will separate idle chatter from more serious presentations of the subject matter.

[tommythejoat]

I am about to set up this scheme of subforums to the wiki default forum to hold topical articles in a segregated space for clocks, watches, tools, etc. When I create a subforum from wiki default, I do not need to do any work in the namespace, do I? I do not see any facility there to do anything. I will mark the new subforum as a wiki, but as far as Vault Wiki is concerned it is still just part of the Wiki Default namespace.

I am going to be bringing this stuff live late tonight, so I may just have normal anxiety over it, but I want to make sure I really understand it.

[pegasus]

Yes, all you need to do is mark the subforum as wiki, because as far as VaultWiki is concerned it is already a child of the Wiki Default namespace.