Internet forum
online discussion site
An Internet forum, or message board, is an online discussion platform where people can hold conversations in the form of posted messages. They differ from chat rooms in that messages are often longer than one line of text, and are at least temporarily archived. Also, depending on the access level of a user or the forum set-up, a posted message might need to be approved by a moderator before it becomes publicly visible. The name comes from the forums of Ancient Rome.
Forums have a specific set of jargon associated with them; for 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 sub-forums, each of which may have several topics.
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 modern forum originated from bulletin boards and so-called computer conferencing systems, which are a technological evolution of the dial-up bulletin board system (BBS). From a technological standpoint, forums or boards are web applications that manage user-generated content.
The public source identifies “Internet forum” as online discussion site. This brief keeps that definition visible, then builds a research path around Internet, forum and online.
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This entry incorporates text from “Internet forum” on English Wikipedia. Contributors are listed in the page history. Text is available under the Creative Commons Attribution-ShareAlike 4.0 License. Selected authority identifiers and statements are retrieved from Wikidata under CC0; their references and qualifiers remain part of the verification path.