Internet forum

Also known as message board, forum, bulletin board, discussion group, discussion board, web forum, online bulletin board, discussion space

online discussion site

AI overview

An Internet forum is a website where people can post messages and have conversations about topics they're interested in, organized into different discussion areas. Forums matter because they allow strangers from around the world to share information, ask questions, and connect with others who have similar interests.

AI-generated from the Wikipedia summary — may contain errors.

Wikidata facts

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Commons category: Internet forums
equivalent class: rdfs.org/sioc/ns#Forum

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Article

An Internet forum powered by phpBB FUDforum, another Internet forum software package Wikipedia's Internet Forum, The Wikipedia Village Pump, as of 2025 An Internet forum, or message board, is an online discussion platform where people can hold conversations in the form of posted messages. They differ from chat rooms in that messages are often longer than one line of text, and 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 publicly visible. The name comes from the forums of Ancient Rome.

Forums have a specific set of jargon associated with them; for example, a single conversation is called a "thread" or "topic". A discussion forum is hierarchical or tree-like in structure; a forum can contain a number of sub-forums, each of which may have several topics.