Forum on two different Domains

[av0id]

Hey guys,

Is it possible to have my forum hosted on two different domains?
To explain a bit better, my forum is currently at mydomain.com/forum but i own a 4 letter .net domain that is an abbreviation of my websites name.
What I want is for if the person was to visit my forum from mydomain.com/forum and went to a topic the url would be like this
mydomain.com/forum/index.php?/topic/(insert rest of URL here)
but if they went to my 4 letter domain and went to a topic it would show like this
aaaa.net/forum/index.php?/topic/(insert rest of URL here)

Sorry if what im asking is confusing, I don't really know how to explain it better then how I have at the moment.
I look forward to your replies

av0id Reviewed by av0id on 23rd Feb 2012. Forum on two different Domains Hey guys, Is it possible to have my forum hosted on two different domains? To explain a bit better, my forum is currently at mydomain.com/forum but i own a 4 letter .net domain that is an abbreviation of my websites name. What I want is for if the person was to visit my forum from mydomain.com/forum and went to a topic the url would be like this mydomain.com/forum/index.php?/topic/(insert rest of URL here) but if they went to my 4 letter domain and went to a topic it would show like this Rating: 5

[Froomple]

why cant you simply redirect the .net domain to your main domain ?

[av0id]

Yes that's how it is at the moment, but I was just curious to know if it is possible to do.

[Lock Down]

I am not sure that it is not possible.

Each site would have it's own forum files and so the navigation would use that site addresses. Now as far as SEO would go you could not use seo through a program built in or otherwise that stores those addresses in the database.

And I would not cache topics as some forums have set as a default at all.

But you should be able to use an .htaccess rewrite to do it.

Theoretically the site hosting the database would need to add a user from the new site at their ip. All table locking is built in to most forum software.

[Crossy]

Just redirect it to where ever you want it to point to

[WDF]

A forum installation on each domain sharing a database is the first thought I had.

Sharing a database would be challenging though unless you only share certain tables. Although this info would probably apply to most php/mysql forum software I use vbulletin.

User, Forum, Thread, Post related tables would need to be shared but there are a few site specific tables that would need to be independent for each URL to maintain it's individuality. Those table calls would need to be changed in the code.

It is possible but it probably will not be easy but the end result would be 2 sites sharing the same content and users in real time.

[michaellin85]

vBulletin comes with an option in the admincp or config file to add a slave server... This server will act as a replication server.. Only issue with this is the new domain will read the same topics, but cannot submit new topics because they will be overwritten by the replication process. So a php check via the posting template will be needed to check if the person is in the main domain to post the topic. the new abbreviated domain will need to be pointed to the slave server.

[vbnet]

It is possible with vBulletin.

In admincp => Site Name / URL / Contact Details => Forum URL, leave this field blank, you'll get what you want, but there will be a problem with activation mails because activation URLs won't work without the above field filled, you'll need to modify some phrases to make it work.

[Mr Happy]

OK in summary yes it is possible but not easy and how easy it is depends on your forum script.

I want to get onto a more important point though - why would you do this? This basically makes a live duplicate version of your site which isn't good for SEO or traffic. You'll also confuse members as if I'm reading a topic I could read something about aaaa.net and another person is talking about randomname.com when they are the same thing. For people not familiar with the site this is going to be confusing.

The only reason I could see this useful if they were in different languages. This would be like the way you have google.com and google.es or google.de etc. They are different domains with the same content but in different languages. You could have aaaa.net in a different language to the main site but otherwise I don't see a reason besides a redirect.

What I would do is improve the existing redirect you currently have to make it like twitter does with t.co and youtube does with youtu.be or fb.com which are all shorter versions of the site used as a redirect to the main one.

[l0calh0st]

It is possible using Reverse Proxy, or using nginx. But it's not easy