In terms of some of the technical issues, yes you'd need two licenses for the two forums. The database side would be fairly easy.

I used to have my WineIntro forum as a part of the LisaShea forum. Eventually I was persuaded that it would get more traffic if it was its own wine focused forum and not just a sub-part of another larger forum.

So I bought another license for the WineIntro site and copied the entire database and file system into its own area.

Once I had two copies running, I pruned down the LisaShea forum so it no longer had the WineIntro area.

I then pruned down the WineIntro forum so it no longer had any of the non-WineIntro content.

So what you are looking for - two separate forums - was the first stage of my process. I did indeed do that and it worked fine.

I echo what others say about duplicate content and such. That being said, worrying about Google may be the forum members' least concern. They may not care at all about how Google links to them or indexes them. They may solely care about their little community and their own interactions. In which case, I say have at it. Have two separate communities that each can modify. Heck, it could be that each community truncates out the other communities' posts and discussions and that it does in fact end up being two fairly separate sets of data.


Lisa Shea, owner, BellaOnline.com
BellaOnline Website
BellaOnline Forums - UBB since Apr 2002 - 58,000 members / 850,000 posts