An online internet forum is a kind of online discussion board where interested users can discuss any related topic within a particular scope. Users can be grouped into various categories and a different set of rules can be defined for each set of user groups. Normally unregistered users will not be able to post in the forums or there will be a limit of posting to be reached within the time frame to enable links in the posting.
A forum is a structured bulletin board both for the content as well as the users and the appropriate users can post their opinions on that topic.
Structure of a Forum Site
- The forum is categorized into many categories and each category can have many sub-forums.
- Sub-forums can also have additional sub-forum.
- Threads or Topics are the places where members can post their content.
- Display of the threads can be customized to show it as a nested posts showing reply to reply or just a plain posts starting from the latest to the oldest.
- The post is the last element but these are essentially the content of the forum. Users can express their thoughts in an editor and post it on a thread. Normally post shows all the relevant details of the user who posted it so that the forum members can directly contact the user.
User Group Classification in Forum
The biggest advantage of a forum is the control of the user's ability to do actions according to their user groups.
- User groups are created like Administrator, Moderator, Registered users and Guests. Registered users can be further classified into premium user and free user as per the will of the forum owner.
- Privileges are defined to each user groups, for example, a guest user can only display the threads and will not be able to post his content on the forum.
- Each user is classified into one of the user group and auto-controlled by the privileges of that group.
- The same person can take multiple responsibilities in a forum and a sample responsibility chart is as shown below:
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