Running 2 instances of Vbulletin and VBSEO on one domain

Hi,

I run www.gyancentral.com/forum which is a community for students in India. I lot of students have pointed out that they need niche forums for example "students of law" want a law niche forum and "students of engineering" want an engineering niche forum. I was thinking of creating two forums on www.gyancentral.com/law/forum and www.gyancentral.com/engineering/forum for the students.

The following are my queries:

1. Would i need separate Vbulletin and VBSEO licenses for the same?

2. Is it advisable to run two Vbulletin instances on the same domain?

 

You need separate vBulletin licenses for each forum. Not 100% sure about vBSEO but more than likely you will need a second license too.

As far as running two instances of vBulletin on the same domain. That's a not a problem. You will just need to change the cookie path (in the ACP) of one of the boards and run either a separate database or use a different database prefix for the additional forum. A second database is your best bet as some add-ons don't respect table prefixes, which will cause hiccups.

To save a few dollars and for ease of administration you're much better off setting up sub forums and using group permissions to keep law students out of the engineering side and vice versa.

 

This would be my suggestion as well, and since you have vbseo already you can setup "sub-folders" like the examples you have above.
You would have one login and you could style each forum as you wish.

Otherwise it's still possible but you'll need a vb + vbseo license for each forum, most cases when people go this route it's a URL like

law.forum.com
engineering.forum.com

so they separate it out to different sub-domains

 

You need two vBulletin licenses, and two vBSEO licenses to accomplish this.

I had a similar setup almost two years ago.