Forum

An internet term. A 'Forum' was originally a place for ancient Greeks to talk to one another. Now the word is used to describe a web site that allows people to write messages to one another.

There are 'public forums' where anyone can read the messages and there are 'private forums' where you need to belong to the forum group to read messages.

Forums are often split into discussion groups in order to help people find just the topic they need rather than ploughing through hundreds of irrelevant postings.

You 'post' a message to a Forum and each message is called a 'posting'.

A 'thread' is a series of postings that originate from one original post.

A 'flame' is an insulting post.

A 'troll' is someone who maliciously sends flames in order to cause arguments

A 'lurker' is someone who reads posts but never sends any.

A 'moderator' is someone who decides which posts can appear on the Forum, they are usually looking to block inappropriate topics or language.

If you happen to have a server and database available then there are many free Forum packages that you can use to set up a Forum. For example the Open Source PHPbb is very popular.

2020-10