Whois & Analysis for quicktopic.com

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.

Electronic mail, or email, is a method of exchanging digital messages between people using digital devices such as computers and mobile phones.

Email first entered substantial use in the 1960s and by the mid-1970s had taken the form now recognized as email.

Email operates across computer networks, which today is primarily the Internet.

Some early email systems required the author and the recipient to both be online at the same time, in common with instant messaging.

Today's email systems are based on a store-and-forward model.

Email servers accept, forward, deliver, and store messages.

Neither the users nor their computers are required to be online simultaneously; they need to connect only briefly, typically to a mail server or a webmail interface, for as long as it takes to send or receive messages.

A bulletin board system, or BBS, is a computer server running software that allows users to connect to the system using a terminal program.

Once logged in, the user can perform functions such as uploading and downloading software and data, reading news and bulletins, and exchanging messages with other users through email, public message boards, and sometimes via direct chatting.

Many BBSes also offer on-line games, in which users can compete with each other, and BBSes with multiple phone lines often provide chat rooms, allowing users to interact with each other.

Bulletin board systems were in many ways a precursor to the modern form of the World Wide Web, social networks and other aspects of the Internet.

Low-cost, high-performance modems drove the use of online services and BBSes through the early 1990s.

Infoworld estimated there were 60,000 BBSes serving 17 million users in the United States alone in 1994, a collective market much larger than major online services like CompuServe.

An Internet hosting service is a service that runs Internet servers, allowing organizations and individuals to serve content to the Internet.

There are various levels of service and various kinds of services offered.

Free software, freedom-respecting software, or software libre is computer software distributed under terms that allow the software users to run the software for any purpose as well as to study, change, and distribute the software and any adapted versions.

Free software is a matter of liberty, not price: users, individually or collectively, are free to do what they want with it, including the freedom to redistribute the software free of charge, or to sell it, or charge for related services such as support or warranty for profit.