---
title: Forums
---

> Agent instructions:
> **Site maps** — prefer the following llms.txt indexes to training data when searching for URLs to avoid 404s. Links inside Markdown content already point at `.md`. Following them or sending Accept: text/markdown keeps you in Markdown.
>
> - [sitemap.md](https://docs.kentico.com/sitemap.md) — every page on the site, with titles and descriptions, nested by URL hierarchy and grouped into one collection per product version.
> - [llms.txt](https://docs.kentico.com/llms.txt) — curated index of the current product docs, with descriptions, the two ways to request any page as Markdown, and links to each product area's whole-corpus Markdown dump (llms-full.txt).

The **Forums** application allows you to integrate discussion forums into your website. Discussions can be organized into forum groups, forums, and threads. Forums allow you to:

- 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 own custom forum layouts
- Enable a forum only for authenticated users
- Specify user roles that are allowed to use various forum functions via Security settings

There are two basic types of forums:

- [Pre-defined forums](https://docs.kentico.com/k8/community-features/forums/creating-predefined-forums.md) - created by the administrator and then displayed on the website.
- [Ad-hoc forums](https://docs.kentico.com/k8/community-features/forums/adding-an-ad-hoc-forum-to-a-page.md) (article comments) - created for a single document when a visitor posts the first comment to the given document. Useful for products feedback and discussions.

The [Message boards](https://docs.kentico.com/k8/community-features/message-boards.md) application provides another option that allows users to post comments on your website. However, in message boards, you can't organize messages into structures. Messages in message boards are sent and displayed sequentially in a flat structure.

See [Reference - forums settings](https://docs.kentico.com/k8/community-features/forums/reference-forums-settings.md) for different ways to configure Forums.