There are various ways in which discussions can take place:
- One is live discussions by means of chat, live messaging, etc. For more on this, see the index page for chat sites, go to the chat page for chat tools, or go to this site's chatroom to see if there are people to chat with.
- Another alternative is Newsgroups, UseNet or IRC. This site concentrates on the WEB.
Another alternative is email. Combined with mailing lists, this is a powerful option. For more on this, go to the mail page.
This particular page deals with what is often referred as forums. It also includes conferencing, communities, linear discussions or salon type of discussions as common in services such as CommunityWare. For many people, the word board, such as in advertising boards, noticeboards, message boards, billboards, means adding a message for public display. More interactive are discussion boards, wwwboards, bulletin boards or bbs. These concepts increasingly overlap. A forum can comprise a broad range of discussion facilities in which participants do not interact in live communication, but if messages are added quick enough, it can take the appearance of live chat.
If discussions follow each other up in time, they are often called salon-type discussions. The advantage is that one can go back and read previous messages easily. If multiple participants are online and add messages rapidly, this can be very similar to live chat.
Discussions can also be indexed according to subject, showing replies to each entry underneath. This allows for threaded search, in which various discussions are simultaneously accessed.
Check out the following places, if you want to have your own forum, discussion board, etc:
If you like the idea of having your own board, check out the Forum Examples page for more descriptions and to see how some of the above boards work in practice. Keep in mind that these boards are run on the server of the service providers, who often add their own ads.
Sometimes, you can add your own banner ads, for display at other boards in a certain ratio (e.g., two of your banners displayed at other boards for every three impressions at your board). Two examples are given below:
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LinKo
(your own wwwboard)
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WebPost
(forums and advertising billboards)
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But if you do not want ads or if you want to add your own banners, logos, etc, you will have to run a board on your own site. For sites that give you cgi-bin access, check out the providers of Free Pages. Also check out Matt's Script Archive for some of Matt Wrights awesome scripts, including wwwboards, search engines, guestbooks and counters.
Of course, if you are only interested in following and participating in some great discussions, you don't need your own board.
Public forums where you can add posts and add your own topics can be found on the Index Page of this site.
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