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Forums (116 products)

[edit] Brief Description

A Discussion Forum (a.k.a. forum, discussion board) is an online service that allows registered users to post questions and responses to other posted questions. Is a facility on the World Wide Web for holding discussions and posting user generated content, or the web application software used to provide the facility. A forum is essentially a website composed of a number of member-written threads. Each thread entails a discussion or conversation in the form of a series of member-written posts. These threads remain saved on the forum website for future reading indefinitely or until deletion by a moderator. However, forum software can be considerably more advanced and include features like polls, user profile, private messaging, feeds, e-mail notifications, HTML editor, image sharing.

Synonyms: Discussion Board, Discussion Forum, newsgroups, Bulletin Board System

Tags: board, bulletin board, community, discussion groups, forums, messages

[edit] Wiki description

Contents
Description Types of forums Features General features Posts features Forums features Antispam and security features Notification Features Community Features Moderation features Search features Customization features Special features Data management features Top software Open source forum software Commercial forum software How to choose Communities See also

Description

A Internet Forum application (also named web forums, message boards, discussion boards, discussion groups, discussion forums, bulletin boards) is a software that holds discussions and posts user generated content.

Common Internet Forum software will allow the webmaster to define several forums (also known as boards) which act as containers for topics (also known as threads) started by users. Other users can post replies to topics and start new topics as they wish.

Certain users will become moderatorss - acquiring special privileges to move topics to other forums, delete posts and topics or edit posts in order to keep the peace and uphold the rules set out by the webmaster.

Types of forums

By the level of registration required:

requiring registration: users choose a Pseudonym, password and provide their e-mail address in advance
allows anyone to post anonymously

By the structure:

flat: each reply within a certain topic is listed in chronological order
threaded: each post descends from a parent post
combined

By license:

free and open-source (GPL / BSD / Apache License / LGPL)
commercial

By the technologies used:

Java / Java Script + XML + MySQL / Oracle / SQL Server / PostgreSQL / Flat-file database
PHP + MySQL / PostgreSQL / Oracle / Flat-file database
Perl + MySQL / Perl DBI / Flat-file database
ASP.NET + ASP.NET Microsoft SQL Server
Pyton + MySQL / PostgreSQL / Oracle database

Features

General features

License (if it's open-source or not, if it's free or not)
Programming language
Databases supported (MySQL / Postgres / Oracle / SQLite / Textfiles or other)
Free Hosting available
Type (threaded, flat or both supported)
UTF-8 support (the board supports utf-8-encoding)

Posts features

BBCode Supported (BBcode is a short but concise markup language commonly used on forum softwares)
HTML code accepted
emoticons available (emoticons are displayed as images)
formatting toolbar or WYSIWYG editor available (a WYSIWYG - what you see is what you get - editor allows the user to write content easily without being necessary to know any kind of coding)
quoting supported
syntax highlighting
attachments accepted

Forums features

unlimited categories supported
sub-forums supported
last post displayed
redirect forums (act as internal or external links to other pages on the same website as a forum or to other webpages on the internet)
trashcan forum (serve several purposes: they store deleted threads/topics before they are ‘hard’ deleted, allow multiple people to view threads/topics that are ready to be deleted, allow moderators to change their minds about threads/topics and undelete them)

Antispam and security features

CAPTCHA supported (a image created by the program that contains random text that can contain either numbers, letters or both that the user has to retype in order to prove he's not a robot)
Groups (groups ease the maintenance of access restrictions, because restrictions can be applied to a group of people at once and do not need to be assigned to each user seperately)
Flood control (it makes sure a user can not post many times in a certain time frame)
ACLs (Access Control List allows the admin to block certain parts of the program from certain groups or users with a certain amount of posts)
Blacklist
Warnings
Suspension
Bans
IP-Block (deny access to a member/internet user to the forums based on their IP address)
Audit Logging
User Reports

Notification Features

RSS/ATOM feed created
E-mail notifications supported
Instant Messaging notifications
Bookmarks

Community Features

Avatars
User ranks
Rating / Karma System (users rate other users based on their posts)
Signatures
Users Online List
Private Messaging
Custom profile fields

Moderation features

Moderators (global moderators or per forum)
Move / split / close threads
Shadow topics
Sticky / important threads

Search features

Full-text search
Author search
Advanced search
Unread topics for every user or per session

Customization features

Languages supported
Templates available (and the type of template: table based, CSS based)
Custom BBCodes
Skin-editor
Smiley Packs
Plugins

Special features

Statistics
Polls
Calendar
Friendly URLs

Data management features

Pruning
Archiving
Exports

Top software

Open source forum software

	phpBB - phpBB is one popular forum application that is realest under GNU GPL license. It is developed in PHP and it supports a MySQL, PostgreSQL, MS-SQL or even Access/ODBC database. phpBB aims to be designed with security as a priority, being flexible (supporting multiple language interface and highly customizable) and extensible.

	Simple Machines Forum (SMF) is a free-to-use forum application that allows to set up a online community or forum in a only a few minutes. SMF offers easy-to-modify theme support and has highly optimized database structure and queries are suitable for small and large forums.

Commercial forum software

	vBulletin is a forum software written in PHP that uses a MySQL database. It has a template interface that includes multiple styles which can be applied to different forums and users. Also, a search engine, user profiles, extensive admin control panel, forums and posts that have many sorting options and support pictures, polls or ratings features are available. It is suitable for medium and large forum communities. Being paid software, vBulletin ensures much better security of its code and database.

	Jive Forums - JiveForum is a award-winning forum software that aims to be practical, innovative and quality. It offers full access to source code, free development licenses and many features and it's designed for companies looking for the gold standard in online forums. The pricing starts at $24,950 per license and can increase for more CPUs.

How to choose

On the forum softwares market there are many applications offering all the main features of a forum, but it depends on your needs to get the application you need.

If you represent a big company, you probably can't risk anything and you can afford to spend more a considerable amount on the application just to don't have surprises. Usually forums are developed by enthusiastic persons from communities and most of the solutions are free and open-source but there are a few commercial and really reliable solutions as well:

vBulletin: if you need the main features of a forum but nothing too flashy and special, and of course you want the reliability of a commercial application
Jive Forums: if you want a award-winning application with all the features you can imagine.

For small companies or individual users that want to create small or medium community forums with a low budget, almost every time the open source solutions are the best choice. The best solutions from this point of view are: phpBB and Simple Machines Forum (SMF).