Naven
Answers
What is an online forum?
An online forum is a website where people hold public discussions in threads: somebody posts a question or topic, and others reply underneath, with the whole conversation kept so anybody can read it later. Unlike a chat, where messages scroll past in real time, a forum is organised by topic and built to be read and searched long after it was written.
How a forum is organised. A forum is split into categories or communities, such as Tech, Books or Help. Inside each are threads (also called topics or posts), each started by one person with a title and an opening message. Replies go underneath, sometimes nested so you can reply to a specific reply. Many forums let members vote on posts and replies, so the most useful rise to the top.
Where forums came from. They descend from bulletin board systems in the 1980s and Usenet newsgroups, and became common on the web in the late 1990s and 2000s with software such as phpBB and vBulletin. Reddit is the largest modern example: thousands of communities (subreddits), each a forum of its own. Stack Overflow is a forum shaped around questions and accepted answers. Discourse is modern open-source forum software used by many projects.
Forum versus chat. A group chat is for talking now: it is fast, everyone sees each message as it arrives, and older messages get buried. A forum is for topics that last: each discussion keeps its title, people can join days later, and the answer to a question stays findable, often through a search engine. That is why so many search results are forum threads.
Staying safe on a forum. Forum posts are usually public, so assume anybody can read them, including search engines. Never post your address, phone number, school or passwords. Use a username or first name rather than your full name. Report posts that break the rules instead of arguing in the replies.
The Naven Forum is an example: communities for school, tech, gaming, books and more, where every post is screened before it appears and anybody can read without an account.