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Simple Machines. Internet forum. An Internet forum powered by phpBB FUDforum, another Internet forum software package. An Internet forum, or message board, is an online discussion site where people can hold conversations in the form of posted messages.[1] 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 visible. Forums have a specific set of jargon associated with them; e.g. 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, 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 in order to post messages. History Internet forums are prevalent in several developed countries. Structure User groups Post. Personal Development for Smart People Forums. Free Speech in Online Communities: The Delusion of Entitlement. Back in 2004 and 2005 when people asked me what I did for a living, I’d tell them I was a blogger. I got a lot of blank stares and invariably had to explain what a blog was.

After that, people would lower their eyes, figuring that I was obviously on some ridiculous dead-end path with my “online diary.” In January 2006 I gave a 90-minute Power Point presentation to explain blogging to a group of about 60 speakers in Las Vegas. By that time I was earning a decent sustainable living from blogging (a few thousand dollars a month). I predicted that blogs would be everywhere within a few years. That wasn’t a difficult prediction to make since Technorati was reporting such phenomenal growth month after month with no end in sight.

You didn’t have to be particularly prescient to see that blogging and other social media had bright futures. They believe me now. Fast forward a few years, and social media has exploded. Unfortunately there’s a downside to such a rapid technological and social change. Effective Online Forum Usage by Steve Pavlina. What information consumes is rather obvious: it consumes the attention of its recipients. Hence, a wealth of information creates a poverty of attention and a need to allocate that attention efficiently among the overabundance of information sources that might consume it. - Herbert Simon Online forums, message boards, and newsgroups are now ubiquitous. These powerful communication tools offer many strong benefits. However, forum participation can also become a destructive addiction, where the benefits are overshadowed by negative side effects. Here are some potential benefits of regular online forum participation: Intellectual exchange Learning new ideas and refining old ones Enjoying community membership Influencing the forum's evolution Contributing to others Making new friends and contacts New business leads Keeping up with current events Learning about new opportunities Here are some potential negative effects of excessive forum usage: 1. 2. 3. 4. 5. 6. 7. 8.

Why I Shut Down the Forums. In this post I’ll share more details about the reasons I decided to shut down the discussion forums on this site. As I stated in my previous post, I closed them on Dec 26th. The forum archives are still online, and you can search them too. Forum vs. Blog First, let’s talk data. After more than 5 years online, the forums had a total of 48,465 registered members.

That may sound like a large community to some people, but the total number of forum members after 5 years online was still less than one day’s traffic to my blog. Out of all those members, less than 10,000 of them posted more than 5 messages total, so most of them didn’t participate much at all. On any given day, however, only about 400 members would visit the forums, although many of them would visit multiple times per day.

The truth is that the vast majority of visitors to my blog simply aren’t interested in our discussion forums. How did the forums become popular in the first place? What about all the content in the forums?