Mandi’s Presentation

Mandi’s talked about online forums as a recent boom of interactivity on the internet. One of the powerful and interesting features of forums is the archiving ability to backtrack messages in conversations. There are two standard ways to organise threads in forums, the first is flat threads that display all posts in chronological order, the other is a parental system where messages that refer specifically to other messages and grouped. Messages can also be turned ‘sticky’ so that they always appear at the top of the thread, however this is usually an admin privilege.
While many forums can be viewed by everyone, you usually have to be a member to comment in a thread, this usually involves selecting a username and password and sometimes also involves an email address and/or joining fee. There is general forum etiquettes that the admin will enforce on things such as double posting, many forums will offer additional rules to abide by.
Mandi also mentioned, forum addiction, where users become engrossed in conversation for long periods of time. This is a useful technique to keep people returning to a site and valuable for the advertising on the site.