Unlike blogs, forums have many subjects and many points of input. Forums tend to be an open public website where user can post and comment with other users all unrelated to the website’s owner. There are three types of users: Posters (general public), Moderator (special members), Admin (owner).
Posters
The posters to the forum are considered the driving force behind the community. On some forums, a poster may edit or delete his or her own posts, although sometimes these rights are reserved.
Western-style forums often allow an avatar and signature. The avatar is generally a small image often limited to 80×80 pixels (other common dimensions include 100×100 and 90×90 pixels) and limited to a certain filesize (6 kilobytes and 50 kilobytes are common) displayed below a user’s username. The forum signature consists of text and/or images defined by the user and appended at the end of each of his posts. Both fundamentally are just expressions of the user’s creativity, although many forums extend their rules to signatures.
Specialized forums like to split the members into specific groups; a military-themed group, for example, may use military-style ranks, with basic members as ‘privates’ while administrators would be styled as ‘generals’, and moderators may bear the title ‘MP’. These titles are usually displayed below the username or avatar, and also indicate which members have which access.
Moderator
The moderators (short singular form: “mod”) are users (or employees) of the forum which are granted access to the posts and threads of all members for the purpose of moderating discussion (similar to arbitration) and also keeping the forum clean (neutralising spam and spambots etc). Because they have access to all posts and threads in their area of responsibility, it is common for a knowledgeable and trustworthy member to be promoted to moderator for such a task. Moderators also answer users’ concerns about the forum, general questions, as well as responding to specific complaints. Moderators themselves may have ranks: some may be given mod privilege over only a particular topic or section, while others (called ‘global’ or ‘super’) may be allowed access anywhere. Common privileges of moderators include: deleting, merging, moving, and splitting of posts and threads; closing, renaming, stickying of threads; banning, unbanning, warning the members; or adding, editing, removing the polls of threads.
Administrator
The administrators (short form: “admin”) manage the technical details required for running the site. As such, they may promote (and demote) members to moderators, manage the rules, create sections and sub-sections, as well as perform any database operations (database backup etc). Administrators often also act as moderators. Administrators may also make forum-wide announcements, or change the appearance (known as the skin) of a forum.
The term prune used extensively in administration panels is synonymous with delete or remove. The term comes from pruning, the practice of removing diseased, non-productive, or otherwise unwanted portions from a plant.
The system works with two basic functions a Post and a Thread.
Post
A post is a user submitted message enclosed into a block containing the user’s details and the date and time it was submitted. Members are usually allowed to edit or delete their own posts. Posts are contained in threads, where they appear as boxes one after another. The first post starts the thread; this may be called the original post, or OP. Posts that follow in the thread are meant to continue discussion about that post, or respond to other replies; it is not unknown for discussions to be derailed.
On Western forums, the classic way to show a member’s own details (such as name and avatar) has been on the left side of the post, in a narrow column of fixed width, with the post controls located on the right, at the bottom of the main body, above the signature block. In more recent forum software implementations the Asian style of displaying the members’ details above the post has been copied.
Posts have an internal limit usually measured in characters. Often one is required to have a message of minimum length of 10 characters. There is always an upper limit but it is rarely reached – most boards have it at either 10.000, 30.000 or 50.000 characters.
Thread
A thread is a collection of posts, usually displayed – by default – from oldest to latest, although the option for a threaded view (a tree-like view applying logical reply structure before chronological order) can be available. A thread is defined by a title, an additional description that may summarise the intended discussion, and an opening or original post (common abbreviation ‘OP’, which can also mean original poster) which opens whatever dialogue or makes whatever announcement the poster wished. A thread can contain any number of posts, including multiple posts from the same members, even if they are one after the other.
A thread is contained in a forum, and is displayed in chronological order from newest to oldest, where the date is taken as the date of the last post (options to order threads by other criteria are generally available). When a member posts in a thread it will jump to the top since it is the latest updated thread. Similarly, other threads will jump in front of it when they receive posts. When a member posts in a thread for no reason but to have it go to the top, it is referred to as a bump or bumping. Threads which are important but rarely receive posts are stickyed (or, in some software, ‘pinned’). A sticky thread will always appear in front of normal threads, often in its own section.
A thread’s popularity is measured on forums in reply (total posts minus one – the opening post) counts. Some forums also track page views. Threads meeting a set number of posts or a set number of views may receive a designation such as “hot thread” and be displayed with a different icon compared to others threads.