Who needs distributed, sharded forums? Maybe Facebook, but unless you’re creating a Facebook-competitor, just use Mysql, Postgres or whatever you are most comfortable with. If you want to try MongoDB, ok, but don’t expect it to do magic for you. It’ll have its quirks and general nastiness, just as everything else, as I’m sure you’ve already discovered if you really have been working on it already.

Sure, MongoDB may be hyped and seem easy on the surface, but you’ll run into problems which more mature products have already overcome. Don’t be lured so easily, but rather wait until “nosql” matures, or dies.

Personally, I think “nosql” will wither and die from fragmentation, as there are no set standards (almost by definition). So I will not personally bet on it for any long-term projects.

Only thing that can save “nosql” in my book, is if it can integrate into Ruby or similar languages seamlessly, and make the language “persistent”, almost without any overhead in coding and design. That may come to pass, but I’ll wait until then, not now, AND it needs to be more mature of course.

Btw, why are you creating a forum from scratch? There are tons of open source forums which can be tweaked to fit most requirements, unless you really are creating The Next Generation of Forums (which I doubt).