16 Facts About Internet forums

An Internet forums forum, or message board, is an online discussion site where people can hold conversations in the form of posted messages.

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

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.

Forum software packages are widely available on the Internet forums and are written in a variety of programming languages, such as PHP, Perl, Java and ASP.

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

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Logically Internet 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 Internet forums organize visitors and logged in members into user groups.

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

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

Similarly, most Internet 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 Internet forums, a subscription is a form of automated notification integrated into the software of most Internet forums.

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

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

Some Internet 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 Internet 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 Internet 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.