An Online forum is an internet software which allows users to virtually come together and generate content by participating in group discussions and sharing information on a variety of subjects. In fact, this is the most basic way of building an online community for a company, so marketing and product development teams can be directly in touch with their community of end-users and partners.

In this scenario, community members provide direct feedback on products and services to a company and help them develop a more useful and effective product. Community members who develop an interest for the company's products or services, spread the word among their network of friends and contacts.

Community members also support each other by sharing tips and knowledge resources. The combination of all of these interactions, translate into reduced costs and more effective product development, marketing, and  customer support.

Flexible Group Management

Create different groups for different users. This function allows you to either make forums publicly available or make them exclusively accessible to a certain group of users.

Members can privately communicate

Members can send and receive private messages (PM) to each other.

Comprehensive Forum Moderation Tools

Forum is equipped with advanced moderation and administration tools. Administrators and Moderators collaborate with each other to keep the forum environment safe and clean from troubled users. Forum members can report unwanted messages to the administrators and moderators.

Broadcast topics and discussions through the RSS feeds

Real Simple Syndication (RSS) feeds are automatically generated for every forum topic, so members could register to those feeds. These RSS feeds are also useful when a forum application is being integrated with other web applications such as blogs, intranets, content management systems, and  other social networking websites.

Do more with this web application

A Discussion Forum can be used either as a stand alone application, or be integrated with a Social Network Management System (SNS), Intranet, or a generic Content Management System (CMS).

Technical Information

There are many open source forum applications out there. We often use PHPBB3 application as a stand alone installation or in combination with the Joomla! CMS application in case we decided to build a social networking website. 

Drupal CMS is a content management system that already comes with basic forum functionalities.

All of these applications are using Linux, Apache, MySql, and PHP (LAMP) technologies.