14 Facts About Discussion forums

On most Discussion forums, users do not have to log in to read existing messages.

Early Internet Discussion 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.

Some stand alone threads on Discussion forums have reached fame and notability such as the "I am lonely will anyone speak to me" thread on MovieCodec.

Logically Discussion 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.

Internally, Western-style Discussion forums organize visitors and logged in members into user groups.

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For instance, some Discussion forums have disabled postcounts with the hopes that doing so will emphasize the quality of information over quantity.

Almost all Internet Discussion forums include a member list, which allows display of all forum members, with an integrated search feature.

Similarly, most Discussion forums allow users to define a signature, which is a block of text, possibly with BBCode, which appears at the bottom of all of the user's posts.

Common on Discussion forums, a subscription is a form of automated notification integrated into the software of most Discussion forums.

Rules on Discussion forums usually apply to the entire user body and often have preset exceptions, most commonly designating a section as an exception.

Some Discussion forums consider concise, comment-oriented posts spam, for example Thank you, Cool or I love it.

Some Discussion forums have suffered from forum-wide flame wars almost immediately after their conception, because of a pre-existing flame war element in the online community.

Many forums have created devoted areas strictly for discussion of potential flame war topics that are moderated like normal.

Newsreader: The main difference between newsgroups and Discussion forums is that additional software, a News client, is required to participate in newsgroups whereas using a forum requires no additional software beyond the web browser.