Online Internet Forum

An Online Internet Forum is an Internet-based application where a web user can post or read messages about a specific topic online.

• AKA: Online Bulletin Board.
• Context:
  • It can range from being a public online forum to bring a private online forum.
  • It can have a Moderator.
  • It can have (and retain) an Internet Forum Thread.
  • It can have a Message Thread.
  • It can be a Personal Internet Forum (operated by a person) to being a Corporate Internet Forum (operated by a company, such as: Internet Brands or VerticalScope).
  • It can be supported by an Internet Forum System.
  • It can be associated to an Internet Community.
• Example(s):
  • Usenet.
  • Yahoo! Groups.
  • Twitter.
  • an Online Movie Forum.
  • an Online Consumer Electronics Forum, such as: http://avsforum.com
  • an Online Movie Forum, such as: http://forums.corvetteforum.com
  • an IGN PlayStation Lobby.
  • …
• Counter-Example(s):
  • A Chat Room, involves Interactive Communication.
  • An Instant Messaging Service, involves Interactive Communication between an explicit set of persons.
  • An Electronic Mailing List.
  • A Wiki.
  • A Blog.
• See: Bulletin Board, Blog, Slack chat Group.

---

---

References

2001

• (Wikipedia, 2009) ⇒ http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Internet_forum
  • QUOTE: An Internet forum, or message board, is an online discussion site where people can hold conversations in the form of posted messages. They differ from chat rooms in that messages 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”.

    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. Within a forum's topic, each new discussion started is called a thread, and can be replied to by as many people as so wish.

    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. On most forums, users do not have to log in to read existing messages.

2009

• (Wiktionary) ⇒ http://en.wiktionary.org/wiki/Internet_forum
  • 1. (computing) A system in which users may send, read and reply to messages on a particular subject.

2008a

• (Jijkoun et al., 2008) ⇒ Valentin Jijkoun, Mahboob Alam Khalid, Maarten Marx, and Maarten de Rijke\n. (2008). “Named Entity Normalization in User Generated Content.” In: Proceedings of the Second Workshop on Analytics for Noisy Unstructured Text Data (AND 2008). doi:10.1145/1390749.1390755
  • QUOTE: We consider the NEN (named entity normalization) task within the setting of user generated content (UGC), such as blogs, discussion forums, or comments left behind by readers of online documents.

2008b

• (Gómez et al., 2008) ⇒ Vicenç Gómez, Andreas Kaltenbrunner, and Vicente López. (2008). “Statistical analysis of the social network and discussion threads in slashdot.” In: WWW Conference (WWW 2008). http://dx.doi.org/10.1145/1367497.1367585

2004

• (Ludford et al., 2004) ⇒ Pamela J. Ludford, Dan Cosley, Dan Frankowski, and Loren Terveen. (2004). “Think Different: increasing online community participation using uniqueness and group dissimilarity.” In: Proceedings of the SIGCHI conference on Human factors in computing systems (SIGCHI 2004). http://dx.doi.org/10.1145/985692.985772
  • ABSTRACT: Online communities can help people form productive relationships. Unfortunately, this potential is not always fulfilled: many communities fail, and designers don't have a solid understanding of why. We know community activity begets activity. The trick, however, is to inspire participation in the first place. Social theories suggest methods to spark positive community participation. We carried out a field experiment that tested two such theories. We formed discussion communities around an existing movie recommendation web site, manipulating two factors: (1) similarity-we controlled how similar group members' movie ratings were; and (2) uniqueness-we told members how their movie ratings (with respect to a discussion topic) were unique within the group. Both factors positively influenced participation. The results offer a practical success story in applying social science theory to the design of online communities.

---