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 - created by the administrator and then displayed on the website.
- Ad-hoc forums (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 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 for different ways to configure Forums.