Internet forum
An Internet forum, or message board, is an online discussion platform where people can hold conversations in the form of posted messages. They differ from chat rooms in that messages are often longer than one line of text, and are at least temporarily archived. Also, depending on the access level of a user or the forum set-up, a posted message might need to be approved by a moderator before it becomes publicly visible.
Forums have a specific set of jargon associated with them; for example, a single conversation is called a "thread" or "topic". The name comes from the forums of Ancient Rome.
A discussion forum is hierarchical or
tree-like in structure; a forum can contain a number of subforums, each of which may have several topics. Within a forum's topic, each new discussion started is called a [|thread] and can be replied to by as many people as they so wish.
Depending on the forum's settings, users can be anonymous or have to register with the forum and then subsequently log in to post messages. On most forums, users do not have to log in to read existing messages.
History
The modern forum originated from bulletin boards and so-called computer conferencing systems, which are a technological evolution of the dial-up bulletin board system. From a technological standpoint, forums or boards are web applications that manage user-generated content.Early Internet forums could be described as a web version of an electronic mailing list or newsgroup, allowing people to post messages and comment on other messages. Later developments emulated the different newsgroups or individual lists, providing more than one forum dedicated to a particular topic.
Internet forums are prevalent in several developed countries. Japan posts the most, with over two million per day on their largest forum, 2channel. China also has millions of posts on forums such as Tianya Club.
Some of the first forum systems were the Planet-Forum system, developed at the beginning of the 1970s; the EIES system, first operational in 1976; and the KOM system, first operational in 1977. In 1979 students from Duke University created an online discussion platform with Usenet.
One of the first forum sites is Delphi Forums, once called Delphi. The service, with four million members, dates to 1983.
Forums perform a function similar to that of dial-up bulletin board systems and Usenet networks that were first created in the late 1970s. Early web-based forums date back as far as 1994, with the WIT project from the W3 Consortium, and starting at this time, many alternatives were created. A sense of virtual community often develops around forums that have regular users. Technology, video games, sports, music, fashion, religion, and politics are popular areas for forum themes, but there are forums for a huge number of topics. Internet slang and image macros popular across the Internet are abundant and widely used in Internet forums.
Forum software packages are widely available on the Internet and are written in a variety of programming languages, such as PHP, Perl, Java, and ASP. The configuration and records of posts can be stored in text files or in a database. Each package offers different features, from the most basic, providing text-only postings, to more advanced packages, offering multimedia support and formatting code. Many packages can be integrated easily into an existing website to allow visitors to post comments on articles.
Several other web applications, such as blog software, also incorporate forum features. WordPress comments at the bottom of a blog post allow for a single-threaded discussion of any given blog post. Slashcode, on the other hand, is far more complicated, allowing fully threaded discussions and incorporating a robust moderation and meta-moderation system as well as many of the profile features available to forum users.
Some stand-alone threads on forums have reached fame and notability, such as the "I am lonely will anyone speak to me" thread on MovieCodec.com's forums, which was described as the "web's top hangout for lonely folk" by Wired magazine, or Stevan Harnad's Subversive Proposal.
Purpose
Online discussion platforms can engage people in collective reflection and exchanging perspectives and cross-cultural understanding.Public display of ideas can encourage intersubjective meaning making.
Online discussion platforms may be an important structural means for effective large-scale participation.
In education
Online discussion platforms can play a role in education. In recent years, online discussion platform have become a significant part of not only distance education but also in campus-based settings.The proposed interactive e-learning community is a platform that engages physics students in online and classroom learning tasks. In brief classroom discussions fundamental physics formulas, definitions and concepts are disclosed, after which students participate in the iELC form discussion and utilize chat and dialogue tools to improve their understanding of the subject. The teacher then discusses selected forum posts in the subsequent classroom session.
Classroom online discussion platforms are one type of such platforms.
Rose argues that the basic motivation for the development of e–learning platforms is efficiency of scale — teaching more students for less money.
A study found that learners will enhance the frequencies of course discussion and actively interact with e-learning platform when e-learning platform integrates the curriculum reward mechanism into learning activities.
In smart cities
"City townhall" includes a participation platform for policy-making in Rotterdam.In 2022, United Nations reported that D-Agree Afghanistan is used as a digital and smart city solutions in Afghanistan. D-Agree is a discussion support platform with artificial intelligence–based facilitation. The discussion trees in D-Agree, inspired by issue-based information system, contain a combination of four types of elements: issues, ideas, pros, and cons. The software extracts a discussion's structure in real time based on IBIS, automatically classifying all the sentences.
Streamlining
Online discussion platforms may be designed and improved to streamline discussions for efficiency, usefulness and quality. For instance voting, targeted notifications, user levels, gamification, subscriptions, bots, discussion requirements, structurization, layout, sorting, linking, feedback-mechanisms, reputation-features, demand-signaling features, requesting-features, visual highlighting, separation, curation, tools for real-time collaboration, tools for mobilization of humans and resources, standardization, data-processing, segmentation, summarization, moderation, time-intervals, categorization/tagging, rules and indexing can be leveraged in synergy to improve the platform.In 2013 Sarah Perez claimed that the best platform for online discussion doesn't yet exist, noting that comment sections could be more useful if they showed "which comments or shares have resonated and why" and which "understands who deserves to be heard".
Online platforms don't intrinsically guarantee informed citizen input. Research demonstrates that such spaces can even undermine deliberative participation when they allow hostile, superficial and misinformed content to dominate the conversation. A necessary mechanism that enables these platforms to yield informed citizen debate and contribution to policy is deliberation. It is argued that the challenge lies in creating an online context that does not merely aggregate public input but promotes informed public discussion that may benefit the policy-making process.
Online citizen communication has been studied for an evaluations of how deliberative their content is and how selective perception and ideological fragmentation play a role in them.
One sub-branch of online deliberation research is dedicated to the development of new platforms that "facilitate deliberative experiences that surpass currently available options".
Structure
A forum consists of a tree-like directory structure. The top end is "Categories". A forum can be divided into categories for the relevant discussions. Under the categories are sub-forums, and these sub-forums can further have more sub-forums. The topics come under the lowest level of sub-forums, and these are the places under which members can start their discussions or posts. Logically, forums are organized into a finite set of generic topics, driven and updated by a group known as members, and governed by a group known as moderators. It can also have a graph structure.All message boards will use one of three possible display formats.
Each of the three basic message board display formats: Non-Threaded/Semi-Threaded/Fully Threaded,
has its own advantages and disadvantages. If messages are not related to one another
at all, a Non-Threaded format is best. If a user has a message topic and multiple
replies to that message topic, a semi-threaded format is best. If a user has a message
topic and replies to that message topic and responds to replies, then a fully threaded
format is best.
User groups
Internally, many forums organize visitors and logged-in members into user groups; privileges and rights are given based on these groups. A user of the forum can automatically or manually be promoted to a more privileged user group based on criteria set by the administrator. A person viewing a closed thread as a member will see a box saying he does not have the right to submit messages there, but a moderator will likely see the same box, granting him access to more than just posting messages.An unregistered user of the site is commonly known as a guest or visitor. Guests are typically granted access to all functions that do not require database alterations or breach privacy. A guest can usually view the contents of the forum or use such features as read marking, but occasionally an administrator will disallow visitors to read their forum as an incentive to become a registered member. A person who is a very frequent visitor of the forum, a section, or even a thread is referred to as a lurker, and the habit is referred to as lurking. Registered members often will refer to themselves as lurking in a particular location, which is to say they have no intention of participating in that section but enjoy reading the contributions to it.