What is a Forum on the Internet?
A forum on the Internet is a website where you can talk to other people by replying to topics posted by them.
Traditionally a forum is divided into subforums which may be grouped into categories, and posts posted to a subforum are called threads. You can reply to a thread created by another user. All replies are displayed sequentially in chronological order, one after the other. In other words, there are no threaded comments, and replying to another reply in the thread is done by simply quoting and mentioning the post you're replying to.
Traditional forums have certain features that don't exist in modern social media, such as:
- Users can have large avatars (profile pictures), which may be animated GIFs.
- Users can have forum signatures that are displayed on every single post.
- Users can have roles and badges that are displayed on every post, the simplest being "member," "moderator," and "administrator."