Internet forum

An Internet forum, or message board, is an online discussion site where people can stay on to conversations in the remain to of posted messages. They differ from chat rooms in that messages are often longer than one line of text, as well as are at least temporarily archived. Also, depending on a access level of a user or the forum set-up, a posted message might need to be approved by a moderator previously it becomes publicly visible.

Forums work a specific line of jargon associated with them; example: a single conversation is called a "thread", or topic.

A discussion forum is hierarchical or tree-like in structure: a forum can contain a number of subforums, regarded and identified separately. of which may construct several topics. Within a forum's topic, regarded and returned separately. new discussion started is called a thread & can be replied to by as numerous people as 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 sophisticated forum originated from bulletin boards, and asked computer conferencing systems, and are a technological evolution of the dialup bulletin board system. From a technological standpoint, forums or boards are web applications managing user-generated content.

Early Internet forums could be remanded as a web relation of an electronic mailing list or newsgroup such as represent on Usenet; allowing people to post messages andon other messages. Later developments emulated the different newsgroups or individual lists, providing more than one forum, dedicated to a specific topic.

Internet forums are prevalent in several ] with over two million per day on their largest forum, 2channel. China also has numerous 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 KOM system, number one operational in 1977.

One of the first forum sites which is still active today is Delphi Forums, one time 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 starting in the behind 1970s. Early web-based forums date back as far as 1994, with the WIT project from W3 Consortium and starting from this time, many alternatives were created. A sense of virtual community often develops around forums that haveusers. 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 calculation in a variety of programming languages, such as PHP, Perl, Java and ASP. The an arrangement of parts or elements in a particular form figure or combination. and records of posts can be stored in text files or in a database. regarded and identified separately. package helps different features, from the nearly basic, providing text-only postings, to more advanced packages, offering multimedia help and formatting code commonly known as BBCode. Many packages can be integrated easily into an existing website to permit 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 let 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 living as many of the sorting 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 indicated as the "web's top hangout for lonely folk" by Wired magazine.