Chats and Forums

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. Most forum software allows more than one forum to be created. These forums are containers for threads started by the community. Depending on the permissions of community members as defined by the board's administrator, they can post replies to existing threads and start new threads as they wish. Forum software can be broadly divided between those which allow visitors to post anonymously, and those which attribute posts to a registered username. For username-based software, visitors register using a username and a password, and possibly an e-mail address for validation purposes.