M path

• Makeoutclub
• MEETin
• Meetup
• Meettheboss
• MillatFacebook
• Minds
• mixi
• MocoSpace
• MOG
• MouthShut.com
• Mubi
• MyHeritage
• MyLife
• My Opera
• Myspace

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Ah, what the L

• LaiBhaari
• LastFM
• Late Night Shots
• Library Thing
• Lifeknot
• Linkagoal
• LinkedIn
• LinkExpats
• Listography
• LiveJournal
• Livemocha

 

The I's have it

• Ibibo
• Identi.ca
• Indaba Music
• Influenster
• Instagram
• IRC-Galleria
• italki.com
• Itsmy

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Gee

• Gaia Online
• GamerDNA
• Gapyear.com
• Gather.com
• Gays.com
• Geni.com
• Gentlemint
• GetGlue
• GirlsAskGuys
• Gogoyoko
• Goodreads
• Goodwizz
• Govloop
• Grono.net

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e-Net work

• Elftown
• Ello
• Elixio
• English, baby!
• Epernicus
• Eons.com
• eToro
• Experience Project
• Exploroo 

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Sites set

• CafeMom
• Care2
• CaringBridge
• Classmates.com
• Cloob
• ClusterFlunk
• CouchSurfing
• CozyCot
• Crunchyroll
• Cucumbertown
• Cyworld

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Networking, not working

If there's some slippage between the different communication formats, Wikipedia expands out from social media to social networking websites which then allows a comprehensive sweep of any kind of interchange. The list is too long to capture in one blog post

• 43 Things is used for goal setting
•  Academia.edu
• About.me
• Advogato
• aNobii
• AsianAvenue
• aSmallWorld
• Athlinks
• Audimated.com
• Bebo
• Biip.no
• BlackPlanet
• Bolt.com
• Busuu
• Buzznet

 

Ta da, data

So what comes in the form of a forum? It is one thing to know that the most successful electronic message boards focus on internet marketing, commercial website design and domain name trading. On the latest shiny new gadgets. For PC hardware enthusiasts.

I happened upon Warrior Forum and followed their discussions at various times. I'm not engaged in internet marketing so I've never thought to join.
Passive involvement in Digital Point is also possible.

I must have been in those newsgroups from the telnet days but I've wiped those from my memory. I started on DC Message Boards and from there was asked to join or found out about Deadpan Fury and Moorgus Maximus. Razoropolis and Incandescent were to follow.
At the time it seemed good to hang out with people who knew the same references. The proliferation of similar vehicles is testament to that.

Is it a world that is inward-looking? Well, there's bound to be forums on relational databases and blogs on SQL
Nairaland and India-Forums speak to the need for an e-equivalent of shared experience, one that has the dark continent and the sub-continent covered

Android Forums speaks to the rise of the mobile phone but also the popularity of the tablet and the consumption of larger screens still. Much to consider when formatting.

AVSforum.com is the largest discussion forum dedicated to Home Theatre, cinema, and the products used

So a combination of popularity - yer home theatre and Android applications - geek technology, national pastime/continental drift and gamers as here represented by Minecraft.
This is all very well but it does show how specific forums can get; they are defined by something even as nebulous as geographic boundaries or entertainment, they're not as open as social media or personal blogs.

If your passion is for poker (the fireplace implement not the card game you play for money) then you can find information or join a discussion in the 'topics outside what this message board is about channel' they often have. Perhaps there isn't a whole forum devoted to household pokers then it would be better to look for ones on log fire enthusiasts or fireside nostalgia; something that has a good chance of including pokers, rather than hoping that eavesdropping on Somalis might uncover an attractive wrought iron item.

To the fore

The features then of forums are flat vs. threaded, duplicate thread prevention, user-selectable themes, calendar, image attachments, unread message tracking, forum spam defences, user-friendly URLs, export capacity, email interface and single sign-on. Forum builders may have different ideas about the importance of these, these are the ones Wikipedia have used for comparison purposes so you can decide whether they are things you need or would prefer to have when building a board.

We turn to wealthresult.com for the top ten successful forums

1. WarriorForum
2. DigitalPoint
3. Nairaland
4. WebHostingTalk
5. MineCraftForum
6. India-Forums
7. AndroidForums
8. NamePro
9. AVSForum
10. HardForum

and start to wonder if we can do it too.

Forum o meant there

We're now deep in systems territory and that means that I, despite my claims to records management and the writerly habit of safely storing notes. am out of my depth well and truly. This might explain why some of my links are to less technical takes.

The Wikipedia page has two warnings, one dated from 2011 and one from 2014, about veracity. I find that whole thing fascinating. Did no one want to set the record straight or tidy some referencing on the subject of online forums? Should we read anything into this?
In the interests of further linkage I'm most keen to understand those features of message boards and that's where their (as at 5th July 2017) tables and graphs are useful. Messages can be flat or threaded. Curiously, thredded's is not threaded.

Some researchers may appreciate the information that Brian Moon is the creator of Phorum. Technical types who are considering their options may opt to go with the MyBB Group whose latest release was in May, over the open source Sindie or PHPWind of the Hangzhou Detian Information Technology Co. Ltd which haven't had updates since 2014.
This is where the veracity comes in; we have a Hangzhou Detian Experimental Primary School, a construction decoration engineering company and a mechanical and electrical equipment limited company but no information technology company, limited or otherwise.

Data storage system

• MySQL
• PostgreSQL
• MSSQL
• Oracle
• SQLite
• Firebird
• Flat file

Forums and an err or ur-

Layerpoint's Best Free Forum Software 2017, apart from including more platform software like UseBB Forum, Codoforum, YetAnotherForum, and IceBB Forum, provides some more detail in the mechanics of this board software. Here and in Wikipedia's comparison of Internet forum software, we see how they are powered.
phpBB and a number of others are released under the GNU General Public License which means you don't need their permission to change code. bbpress we are informed, is one of the popular WordPress forum plugins.
Discourse is self-hosted forum software. Discuss is written in Ruby - on - Rails

Other forums are written in PHP and have MySQL database as a backend.
YaBB forum is  written in Perl. I note Java and Javascript in the Wikipedia tables.

 All of which is to say you need a degree in information technology to decipher any of that.

II

The other aspect to note is that of an open source forum which implies an ability not just to post but to alter code. I could be talking out of my hat.

Fora not Fiverr

I always thought it was Latin and the plural of forum was fora not forums but I could see how that wouldn't catch on when the electronic message board was still new and novel. They're worth looking at as we can see the same terminology now in use in all the communications channels: posts that are pinned.. remind us that this is an e-format of the original hard copy message board.

Forum software packages featured

• bbPress
• Beehive Forum
• Discourse
• Discuz!
• EsoTalk
• FluxBB
• FUDforum
• Iko
• Ikonboard
• Invision Power Board
• kusaba
• MiniBB
• Phorum
• phpBB
• PHPWind
• PunBB
• Simple Machines Forum
• Syndie 
• Telligent Community
• Thredded
• UBB.threads
• Vanilla Forums
• vBulletin
• WoltLab Burning Board
• XenForo
• YaBB

Message in a Bolthole

Before there was the notion that We blog, we had the online message board. Did we go to it for answers? Nowadays we don't need the format to find out about breeding Angora goats for their wool. We can go to a dozen places to learn to darn socks and sites are specifically set up to help us sell good girl calendars.
It's all added to the mix: some of us want to read a blog about repurposed tins and others a message board where people discuss the single bed.

The original BBS (Bulletin Board System) debuted in the seventies and survived until the mid-nineties. Computerized Bulletin Board was developed by Ward Christensen and Randy Seuss*.

According to makeuseof.com

Usenet is an international system used primarily for topical discussions. The network is built in a hierarchical fashion where each step within the hierarchy corresponds to a particular topic, or newsgroups. Using a news client, users can subscribe to these different newsgroups based on their interests.

 This system predates the World Wide Web.

 IRC, or Internet Relay Chat, made its appearance in 1988. A glorified chatroom system that started as a way to have live chatting between multiple users, it became a network for data transfers and file sharing.

 With IRC, multiple users can connect to a specific server and join multiple chatrooms on that server, though the technical term would be channels.

Forums aka message boards are similar to BBS and Usenet but on a larger scale and in more specialised ways. Software for forum protocol was developed in 1994; WIT by the W3 Consortium. Since then there have been hundreds of packages, and forums remain popular.
*actually it's Randy Suess. Active on social media and a reminder that the Internet isn't always reliable through his very name; I've seen it written both ways

Weblog Jam

Part of the fun of blogging is in being able to go hog wild, which may explain why Arrington blogs outside his paying proposition. He does this, not by hiding his other blog but differentiating it from TechCrunch in the guise of Uncrunched. Or did - the blog is from 2015 and hosted by Wordpress.com

Why doesn't Arianna Huffington earn a motza if her blogging format is so popular? Is it something to do with preserving the independence of Huffington Post? She does earn a tidy sum but didn't make the particular list.

Sometimes the whole problem with blog accuracy makes their patronage dubious. We can be entertained by the odd bent of certain bloggers but should take take these things with a grain of salt. That list of blogging platforms has been around the block and the page I took it from was not the first. This is what caused some difficulties since some had been abandoned or subsumed, or were using code no longer supported.

Naturally for something with no obvious quality control, one has to take the bad with the good. While only a fraction are going to reach the eyes of judges and style experts, it was inevitable there would be some formal recognition.

They differ from another all but antiquated form, the message board and include subsets like the vlog,

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