About Forum Software

Avinash D' Silva on the 02 Oct 2014 in a few words

In this article we will cover how a traditional forum software works and see how codoforum is diffrent from it.

According to Wikipedia, An message board or an Internet forum is an online site for discussions where people can have group conversations by posting messages in the form of text or various other media. Various forum softwares can be used for this purpose.

They differ from chat rooms in a way that message content is usully more longer than one line of text, and are permanently archived in most cases. Also, depending on the access level of a user or the way the forum software set-up, a posted message might need to be approved by an administrator or moderator before it becomes available to the public.

There are some jargons followed by forum softwares:

  • A single conversation is called a "Thread" or a "topic".
  • Messages that make up the conversation are called "posts"

A discussion forum can contain categories. Each category can contain multiple sub categories and each such category can contain multiple "topics" or "threads". It forms a tree like heirarchial structure. The conversations are usually public.

How is a Forum different from a Social Network?

An SNS allows you to create a community wherein the people can not only communicate but also socialize. But the content created around an SNS is not of the same quality as a forum.

A Social Network can produce a lot of irrelevant content and posts which simply don't mean thing to a third person. But a forum is very strict in terms of relevant content. This not only makes it easier for users to find content but also allows search engines to group and index content optimally.

How is codoforum different from existing forums?

It is not at all different in terms of functionality. we have contributed to various open source forum projects and we have a learnt a lot from them.

Codoforum will differ in terms of:

  • better user experience
  • better engagement
  • out of the box functionality
  • ease of development for developers.

why did you write this blog post?

This post was written just to reaffirm what our mission is :)


 
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