Ok..this might be off-topic but some forums uses 'forum' instead of 'forums'...

What is the difference?

It's not off-topic, ibnuasad. It doesn't matter at all. I use "community", some sites use the forum software name, like "phpbb". Prob'ly the most common is forums, but there's no rule about it and I don't believe the search engines place any particular weight on one name or another.

I have a site that never quite got off the ground, but it uses the sub-domain.domain format. It consists of more than just forums (TheMadModder.com, articles.TheMadModder.com, guides.TheMadModder.com, etc.). The use of forums.TheMadModder.com and the other sub-domains (that's what they're called) never seemed to give me any advantage and actually is contrary to the naming convention that most computer users are accustom to.

My latest venture, www.TheFloorPro.com, has a format that is, I think, much easier for the average person to remember as far as layout is concerned. My forums are in a sub-folder called community: TheFloorPro.com/community. Other important categories of my site are also in sub-folders: TheFloorPro.com/articles, TheFloorPro.com/reviews and TheFloorPro.com/how-to.

The use of upper case in domain names makes no difference, but folder names are case sensitive. Your browser will resolve domain names to all lower case. Try any/mixed case in my domain name and you will get my home page every time, but use a capital letter in the folder name and you will get nothing. It's recommended that you always use lower case when naming a folder. I always recommend using lower case in all file names as well and if you do any coding, get in the habit of coding in only lower case unless the code language relies on the use of upper and lower case (I think javascript does, but I'm not sure).

As a webmaster, you should be concerned about 2 things: members and members. Members are people and subject to habits formed over time. If your members are at all computer literate, they will be quite used to folders (domains) and sub-folders -- just the slashes will be backward. Many of your members come from search engines (the other members) and search engines have absolutely no trouble indexing your site in a relevant manner. So what I am saying is that I may have made a mistake in my formatting of TheMadModder.com. I never saw the numbers of search spiders in the nearly a year the forum was open that I do in TheFloorPro.com in only a month. And my TheFloorPro.com members are far less computer savvy (bunch of old guys who crawl on their knees all day) than the computer modding geeks of my previous forums and they have no troubles remembering how to type in the address.

Best R'gards,

Jim McClain

I prefer forums.domain.com, I'm not sure why... to me, it just looks better. My forums work both ways though. I think, though, if you use domain.com/forums at my site, it'll take you to forums.domain.com in the end, because of some links inside the forums using the board URL setting (which is forums.rctgo.com).

For some things, however, I just have domains redirect you to the proper place. For instance, downloads.rctgo.com redirects you to rctgo.com/downloads, but that is because our downloads section is a part of our site, using its files and whatnot...

I think for some things, forums.domain.com are better, while for others, domain.com/forums/ is better. It all depends on your personal preference and which you think will help better.

My members have never complained about it, they've not even commented on it - they know, of course, that if they ever forget it, they can just go to rctgo.com and click on the forums link...

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Justin S. / MyBB Wiki Lead / RCTgo.net

There can be slight benefits to subdomains.

1) As the engines treat subdomains as distinct domains (in some ways), having keywords in a subdomain can help.

2) Having a keyword in a subdomain can help with SERPs (free and PPC),
as well have with branding (a product, say), some people claim.

Always remember, the SERPs are a form of ranked small ads. If you can do anything to influence how your listings appear (even with the free SEs), it's worth it. This is one example.

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TemptingBites : Tickle your taste buds
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http://temptingbites.com/mango-kulfi-desert/

hmm... I prefer forum.domain.com (without s, may be its just a typo). For me it's easier to manage when your forum get bigger (move to another host) or in Google analytics (setting up your goals, where you can only set 4 goals for each site)

Most of my forums are installed in the root folder.

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CafeParents.com - Parent-to-Parent discussion forums

I'm creating a friend network site engine by modifying phpBB, and I'm using mod_rewrite so I can work with the phpBB functions fom the root folder but still have the forum accessible by /forum (completely virtual folder!). I even set the "script path" to /forum... phpBB is none the wiser. But it has the weird side effect of (for example) /viewtopic.php and /forum/viewtopic.php taking you to exactly the same place.

Note to you SEO people: I'm trying to figure out a way to 301-redirect the forum files in the root to the files in /forum, but since mod_rewrite works by creating a virtual request within Apache it always seems to create an endless loop. Any ideas?

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