---
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. 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](https://docs.kentico.com/k81/community-features/forums/creating-predefined-forums.md) - created by the administrator and then displayed on the website.
- [Ad-hoc forums](https://docs.kentico.com/k81/community-features/forums/adding-an-ad-hoc-forum-to-a-page.md) (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](https://docs.kentico.com/k81/community-features/message-boards.md) 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](https://docs.kentico.com/k81/configuring-kentico/managing-sites/configuring-settings-for-sites/settings-community/settings-forums.md) for different ways to configure Forums.