Multilingual q2a forum - Best practice?

Question

I am considering a project, where each user group of a certain language gets their "own forum", meaning interface in their language, all posts/content in their language, so their own ecosystem.

I would like to use subdomains, e.g.

de.myforum.com
en.myforum.com
ru.myforum.com

Now I think, maybe it is a nice idea to have a common userbase (qa_users, using external users). Or if I should "merge" parts of the forums together (e.g. theme file). Or just keep them all separate...

Now I am wondering if anyone of you has already developed such a project.

Which best practices should we follow? What are issues to face?

Thx in advance.

Related:
http://www.question2answer.org/qa/2448/multilanguage-feature-achieve-different-language-activity
http://www.question2answer.org/qa/22244/how-can-the-user-switch-the-language-of-the-q2a-forum
http://www.question2answer.org/qa/tag/multilanguage

Answer 1

I use this system for my 2 sites by sharing the userbase though not for language purpose. No issues with it.

If it is just the language that is different - categories, tags, themes, plugins etc being same, I suggest the best way is to soft link to all Q2A directories from a different folder - especially qa-plugin and qa-themes which ensures site management will be easier.

I suppose a plugin can change the Q2A language per user- but this won't be working for the post contents. Again the post contents can be hidden per basis as per his language, but I do not see any advantage of this approach as contents being from different language means they should be in a different site.