Best Practice for Addresses forums.domain.com

[Guest Danny Michel]

so a lot of forums that i frequent use forums.domain.com as a url.
what are the benefits of that?
how do they do it? do they just setup a sub-domain then re-direct a folder on their server to that url?
if so, is it good practice to use a folder called site.com/forums/ then re-direct the url to that folder?
if the answer to the above is true, why and how is it that when i try to visit any of the popular forums i visit at sitepoint.com/forums/index.php, digitalpoint.com/forums/index.php or http://www.invisionpower.com/forum/index.php i get a 'page not found'?

[cthree]

There is no best practice. Do what works best for you.

[Guest Danny Michel]

not exactly sure what works for me

[mat206]

I would use an arrangement like forums.domain.com in a situation where you have a very large website and need to isolate individual applications to particular servers. Most users don't fall under this category so you may not want to go that route. My setup contains www.domain.com, uploads.domain.com, and images.domain.com. The last two are set up through MaxCDN to accelerate my site.

[ørret]

I'm using forum.domain.com atm (changed from /forum recently), but what I see now is that when I click a forum I get "forum.domain.com/forum" so I am really considering to use the word "community" instead (like here on IPS) to avoid having 2xforum in url and instead use "community.domain.com/forum". But this all depends on how you set up your FURL (if you removed the /forum/ /topic/ etc or not).

[TSilva]

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[ørret]

I am using forum.domain.com as mail url. But when you click a forum let's say "Gaming" it will show forum.domain.com/forum/72-gaming/. It does the same here on IPS only that ips use "community" instead so they get community.domain.com/forum/72-gaming/. My point is if it's bad to use "forum" as a subdomain because it will then be displayed twice in url when clicking a forum category. If you use "community" (like here on IPS forums) you don't have that problem.

Example:
http://community.invisionpower.com/forum/297-company-feedback/ or in code:

http://community.invisionpower.com/forum/297-company-feedback/

Since I use "forum" as a subdomain, a link like this would show:

http://forum.invisionpower.com/forum/297-company-feedback/

When it comes to SEO, what is "better"? Maybe I should just post this in SEO forum now :P