Internet forum
From Saferpedia
A forum or a message board is a website with online discussions. Its origin is in the modern equivalent of a traditional notice board. In terms of technology, forums are web applications managing the content generated by user.
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History
Early forums could be considered to be a web version of a discussions list or a news group which allows people to post messages and comments. Ulterior developing tried to copy various news groups or individual lists offering more than a forum dedicated to a specific subject.
Forums are predominant in developed countries. As number of postings, Japan is by far the leaders with over two millions postings a day on their largest forum: 2channel. China has many postings on forums like Tianya Club.
Forums fulfill a similar function as those of the dial-up notice boards or Usenet networks, very common from late 70s to 90s. Early web based forums dates since 1996. Many times there is developed a feeling of virtual community around forums having frequent users. Technology, computer games and / pr video games, sport, music, fashion, religion and politic are popular areas for forum topics. There are also forum with a very large number of topics.
Forum software packages are available on the Internet and are written in a variety of languages like PHP, Perl, Java and ASP. Settings and posts can be stored in text files or in data base. Each package has different characteristics starting with base ones up to advanced ones, multimedia support and formatted code (known as BBCode).
Registering or anonymity
In US and some parts of Europe most forums require registering to post. Registered users are considered members and are allowed to present or send electronic messages. The registration process implies checking the age (usually over 12 years), terms and services declaration and a request to approve the mentioned terms. If everything goes well the user has to fill a form with user name, nickname and e-mail to validate the registration.
In areas like China and Japan, registering is optional and anonymity is even encouraged. On these forums there can be used a tripcode system (telecommunication authentication) to allow checking someone's identity without having to do a form registration.
Rules and policies
Forums are governed by their stuff and moderators responsible with form's design, technical maintenance and policies. Most forums have a list of rules depicting wishes, purpose and directional lines of forum's creators. Usually there is a FAQ - Frequent Asked Questions section with base information for new members.
Trolls
Forum trolls are people who repeatedly and deliberately break the netiquette established by an online community posting denigrating and offensive messages which are off topic in order to lure and incite users to answer challenges or to test forums rules and policies and its members patience. The action to answer the challenge of a troll is called feeding the troll and is usually discouraged because it can encourage disruptive behavior.
Sock mascot
The term of sock mascot it refers to someone being registered under different nicknames at the same time on a specific forum. The analogy of a sock mascot is a puppeteer holding a puppet on each hand and speaking with both on the same time. A sock puppet will create multiple accounts for a time using each user to debate or to agree with other forum members. Sock puppets are usually found when it's done a check of IPs for each member.
Spam
In forums spam is considered to be a break of the netiquette and it appears if a users repeats the same word or phrase for several times. Spam is usually an act of violence sometimes with bad intentions.
Double posting
A very common habit on forums is to post the same message twice. Sometimes users post versions of an anterior post, especially on forums that don't allow editing older posts. Double posting instead of editing them can artificially increase the number of posts for an user. Also double posting can be unintentional.
Words' censoring
Words' censoring systems are frequently included in the forums' software packages. The system will pick words from the postings' body or from a user editable elements and if it finds a word that needs to be censored will replace it with the asterisk character (*).
