The
Basic Operation
of
Forums
| Definition:
A forum is a place where people come together to discuss atopic. |
| Purpose:
The essence of a conferencing system is itallows users to read and add text messages in a forum. |
| Structure:
All conferencing systems have a way in which messages are organized, but there are many variations. In a "star" structured system, a forum is usually composed of a top level list of the active "discussions", and each discussion has a linear list of messages sorted by the time they were posted. In a "tree" structured system, there is also a top level list of active discussions, but each message in a discussion is followed by its own list of replies, and each reply can have a list of replies, etc. Some systems provide no structure whatsoever, other than ordering all messages by time; these are usually called guestbooks, free-for-alls, or chat systems. Forums provide a systemthat sets the stage for collaboration between participants. Certainly the structure imposed on users by the system influences the look and feel of a forum, but the need to communicate will often transcend any deficiencies. It is really the participants and their contributions that make or break a forum. |
| Presentation
of Forums:
On the web, users can visit a forum on a server and submit messages to the forum via their browsers. A forum typically has a URL - resolving the URL results in a document that may describe the forum and contain references to the discussions in the forum. The forum document also may contain forms or links for performing actions relative to the forum such as composing and submitting messages. Typically there are several forums, one for each major topic of discussion. Withineach forum, there will typically be several minor, more focused topics of discussion, each one called a "discussion" or "conversation" in this paper. Users need
to determine which forum they want to use, so there should be some list
or directory of forums, probably with descriptions of each, that the user
can browse or search through.
|
| Reading the
messages:
The real information in a conferencing system is in the text of the messages, and the lists and outlines of forums,discussions, and messages are just ways of getting to the messages. There are two distinct styles of displaying messages:one message per page, or a continuous stream of several messages. With a single message on a page, some way must be provided for the user to get from one message to the next; navigation is discussed in the next section while most of this section is about displaying several messages at once. Readers typically wish to read not just one message but several related messages. Traversing through the related messages is referred to in this paper as "navigating". Navigatingis largley irrelevant when related messages are displayed inline. But one must navigate from one display of inlined messages to the next. |
| Sorting:
Another important option for presentation is sorting the lists and messages by various criteria. Sorting by date lets users look for just the newer messages since they will be together at the end of the list. Reversing the order displays the newest messages first, which is more useful if not all of the messages are to be displayed - the user might interrupt the transfer of messages, or perhaps only a range of messages will be displayed at one time. |
The information
for this page was taken from the
Presentation
Features of Text-based Conferencing Systems on the WWW
by Daniel
LaLiberte and David Woolley.
Background courtesy of http://www.nepthys.com/textures/