Whois & Analysis for discourse.org

The term chat room, or chatroom, is primarily used to describe any form of synchronous conferencing, occasionally even asynchronous conferencing.

The term can thus mean any technology ranging from real-time online chat and online interaction with strangers (e.g., online forums) to fully immersive graphical social environments.

An Internet forum, or message board, is an online discussion site 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 visible.

A community is a small or large social unit (a group of people) who have something in common, such as norms, religion, values, or identity.

Often - but not always - communities share a sense of place that is situated in a given geographical area (e.g. a country, village, town, or neighborhood).

Durable relations that extend beyond immediate genealogical ties also define a sense of community.

People tend to define those social ties as important to their identity, practice, and roles in social institutions like family, home, work, government, society, or humanity, at large.

Although communities are usually small relative to personal social ties (micro-level), "community" may also refer to large group affiliations (or macro-level), such as national communities, international communities, and virtual communities.

This article outlines the general features commonly found in various Internet forum software packages.

It highlights major features that the manager of a forum might want and should expect to be commonly available in different forum software.

These comparisons do not include remotely hosted services which use their own proprietary software, rather than offering a package for download which webmasters can host by themselves.