The Forums application allows you to integrate discussion forums into your website. You can organize the discussions into forum groups, forums, and threads.
Using the application, you can:
- Open/lock forums
- Perform SQL or index-based full-text searches of forum content
- Subscribe to receive notifications about all posts added to a forum or thread by e-mail
- Moderate forums
- Set forums to use friendly URLs
- Use your custom forum layouts
- Enable a forum only for authenticated users
- Specify user roles that are allowed to use various forum functions via Security settings
The system offers two basic types of forums:
- Pre-defined forums - created by the administrator and then displayed on the website.
- Ad-hoc forums (article comments) - created for a single page when a visitor posts the first comment to the given page. Useful for products feedback and discussions.
Alternatively, users can post comments on your website using the functionality of the Message boards application. However, in the Message boards application, the messages cannot be organized into structures. They are sent and displayed sequentially in a flat structure.
See Settings - Forums for different ways to configure Forums.