What is an Internet Forum?
An Internet or Online forum is a website where people discuss in the form of posted messages. This creates an environment for discussion and encourages the posting of a wide range of opinions. A forum is basically a meeting place for discussion.
Discussions are organized into categories, sub-forums, and threads. A thread is a collection of posts defined by a title and an opening post which summarizes the intended discussion. A thread can contain any number of posts and are displayed in chronological order. The popularity of a thread is judged by reply counts, i.e., the number of posts it receives. A thread receiving more than a set number of posts is sometimes called a hot thread; a thread no longer discussed is called a dead thread.
A post is a message submitted by a member to a thread (refers to Subject). Every post contains the user’s details (such as name and avatar or email) and the date and time it was submitted. The postcount is a count of how many posts a certain user has made. Users with higher postcounts are often considered more reputable.
User groups of a Forum
Registered members are organized into members, moderators, and administrators and given different privileges and rights. Members can only submit posts to one or more threads and are allowed to edit or delete their own posts. A moderator (or mod)is a privileged member who can access the posts and spam attacks. An administrator or admin manages the technical details required for running the site. An administrator changes the ranks of members and moderators, manages the rules, creates sub-forums, makes forum-wide announcements, as well as performs any database operations, and occasionally act as moderators. Only admins can change the skin of a forum.
An unregistered user is known as a guest or visitor. Guests are granted limited access – to only view the contents of the forum.
Features of a Forum
- It has Password generated tripcode.
- The profile has Avatar and Signature.
- Attachments in Posts.
- Emojis are available to implement in any text.
- Personal/Private messages are available to send from user to user.
- Has an option for Polls, to get to know about Opinion on any topic.
- Also has a Block List or Ignore Lists.
Advantages of a Forum
There are many advantages of using an internet forum. Here are some of them
- Intellectual topics and high-quality discussions create lots of useful information and tips.
- With useful information and productive discussion, members stick to the forum and strengthen it.
- Credibility in the community can result in fruitful relationships.
- It helps to build brand awareness.
- It improves communication and performance in people.
Disadvantages of a Forum
- Establishing a good discussion board can be quite difficult and can take a long time before the webmaster can enjoy the benefits of increased traffic or profits.
- Administering and moderating posts to maintain a forum requires a lot of time.
- Online Forums also lack quality sometimes.
- Things are not always in control
- Spamming is one of the biggest disadvantages of Forums. Some People advertise their brand in comments and keep spamming.
- Hard to maintain the rules and regulations.
Some Examples of Forums: Quora, Reddit, Steam Community for gamers, etc.
So in this article, we tried to elaborate the explanation of an internet forum. We hope this article helped you with such a topic, make sure you comment, share your views and also suggest some more points on this topic.