FORUM SOFTWARE

An Internet forum is a facility on the World Wide Web for holding discussions and posting user generated content, or the web application software used to provide this facility. Web-based forums, which date from around 1995, perform a similar function as the dial-up bulletin boards and Internet newsgroups that were numerous in the 1980s and 1990s. A sense of virtual community often develops around forums that have regular users. Technology, computer games, and politics are popular areas for forum themes, but there are forums for a huge number of different topics.

Internet forums are also commonly referred to as web forums, message boards, discussion boards, (electronic) discussion groups, discussion forums, bulletin boards (but see also dial-up bulletin boards), fora (the Latin plural) or simply forums.

The term "forum" and "board" may refer to the entire community, or a specific forum (for example, "off-topic") within the community.

Webbing Systems Forum Features:

A forum is essentially a website composed of a number of member-written threads. Each thread entails a discussion or conversation in the form of a series of member-written posts. These threads remain saved on the forum website for future reading indefinitely or until deletion by a moderator. However, forum software can be considerably more advanced.

Most forum software allows more than one forum to be created. These forums are containers for threads started by the community. Depending on the permissions of community members as defined by the board's administrator, they can post replies to existing threads and start new threads as they wish.

Forum software can be broadly divided between those which allow visitors to post anonymously, and those which attribute posts to a registered username.

For username-based software, visitors register using a username and a password, and possibly an e-mail address for validation purposes. In these types of forums, the members are often able to customize both how their posts display to others (for example avatars, user profiles and signatures) and how the board appears to them (such as different themes). Username-based software may provide for anonymity by allowing visitors to post without registration.

Anonymous forums may offer full anonymity or pseudonymity, but no registration. In order to provide the same set of features as registration-based forums, anonymous forums especially in Asia use a system of trip codes, a system of authentication that does not require registration. Although blog comment pages are not Internet forums, they often use the anonymous system for the sake of simplicity.

Threads in a forum are either flat (posts are listed in chronological order) or threaded (each post is made in reply to a parent post). Sometimes, community members have a choice on how to display threads.

Forum software packages by Webbing Systems written in either PHP / ASP depending on the requirement of the client and web server on which the website is hosted.

Main differences between Blogs and Forums:

The main differences between Blogs and Forums are:

- Forums are created for discussion between several people while Blogs are mainly designed for a single user input, with possibility for other people to comment.

So, Blogs are more like a simple homepage where other people may contribute with comments, but one person rules, blog owner, and blog owner can delete any comment he/she doesn't like. While, in forums, there could be thousands of people posting topic messages and also adding comments ...

When people try to use forums for the purpose of writing a journal, their messages get lost in the stream of messages, making it hard to follow the story.

Also, people tend to post many short messages inside forums, while blogs are more used for posting longer messages (on average).