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59-480: The website features forums dedicated to development in Toronto, where enthusiasts discuss various projects, offer opinions, and share pictures of developments in progress. New development information and illustrations are often shared in the forums before their official release. The website's forums have also influenced revisions to development proposals in response to comments and discussion. The website also features

118-406: A guest or visitor . Guests are typically granted access to all functions that do not require database alterations or breach privacy. A guest can usually view the contents of the forum or use such features as read marking , but occasionally an administrator will disallow visitors to read their forum as an incentive to become a registered member. A person who is a very frequent visitor of the forum,

177-461: A sig ), which is a block of text, possibly with BBCode, that appears at the bottom of all of the user's posts. There is a character limit on signatures, though it may be so high that it is rarely hit. Often, the forum's moderators impose manual rules on signatures to prevent them from being obnoxious (for example, being extremely long or having flashing images) and issue warnings or bans to users who break these rules. Like avatars, signatures may improve

236-408: A "cabal" of "petty tyrants". On 4chan , moderators are subject to notable levels of mockery and contempt. There, they are often referred to as janitors (or, more pejoratively, "jannies" ) given their job, which is tantamount to cleaning up the imageboards' infamous shitposting . The administrators (short form: "admin") manage the technical details required for running the site. As such, they have

295-424: A Non-Threaded format is best. If a user has a message topic and multiple replies to that message topic, a semi-threaded format is best. If a user has a message topic and replies to that message topic and responds to replies, then a fully threaded format is best. Internally, Western-style forums organize visitors and logged-in members into user groups. Privileges and rights are given based on these groups. A user of

354-520: A certain number) when selecting options, as well as private or public display of voters. Polls can be set to expire after a certain date or, in some cases, after a number of days from their creation. Members vote in a poll, and a statistic is displayed graphically. An ignore list allows members to hide posts of other members that they do not want to see or have a problem with. In most implementations, they are referred to as foe list or ignore list . The posts are usually not hidden but minimized, with only

413-400: A certain user has made. Users with higher postcounts are often considered more reputable than users with lower postcounts, but not always. For instance, some forums have disabled postcounts with the hopes that doing so will emphasize the quality of information over quantity. A thread (sometimes called a topic ) is a collection of posts, usually displayed from oldest to latest, although this

472-418: A database and interactive map of different urban developments, which is integrated with the forums. UrbanToronto was founded by Ryan Delrue, who started it as a hobby in 2002 and whose Forum handle was 'billy corgan19982'. The site quickly grew with additional members, and became a community of people interested in architecture design , transportation infrastructure , construction and Toronto's built form, and

531-485: A different icon compared to other threads. This icon may stand out more to emphasize the thread. If the forum's users have lost interest in a particular thread, it becomes a dead thread . Forums prefer the premise of open and free discussion and often adopt de facto standards . The most common topics on forums include questions, comparisons, polls of opinion, and debates. It is not uncommon for nonsense or unsocial behavior to sprout as people lose their temper, especially if

590-422: A forum for threaded, or asynchronous, discussion purposes. The group may or may not be the only users of the forum. A thread's popularity is measured on forums in reply (total posts minus one, the opening post, in most default forum settings) counts. Some forums also track page views . Threads meeting a set number of posts or a set number of views may receive a designation such as "hot thread" and be displayed with

649-546: A huge number of topics. Internet slang and image macros popular across the Internet are abundant and widely used in Internet forums. Forum software packages are widely available on the Internet and are written in a variety of programming languages , such as PHP , Perl , Java , and ASP . The configuration and records of posts can be stored in text files or in a database . Each package offers different features, from

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708-474: A member posts in a thread for no reason but to have it go to the top, it is referred to as a bump or bumping . It has been suggested that "bump" is an acronym of "bring up my post"; however, this is almost certainly a backronym , and the usage is entirely consistent with the verb "bump" which means "to knock to a new position". On some messageboards, users can choose to sage (correctly pronounced /sa-ɣe/ though often confused as IPA: [seɪdʒ] )

767-512: A number of subforums, each of which may have several topics. Within a forum's topic, each new discussion started is called a thread and can be replied to by as many people as they so wish. Depending on the forum's settings, users can be anonymous or have to register with the forum and then subsequently log in to post messages. On most forums, users do not have to log in to read existing messages. The modern forum originated from bulletin boards and so-called computer conferencing systems, which are

826-410: A post if they wish to make a post but not "bump" it. The word "sage" derives from the 2channel terminology 下げる sageru , meaning "to lower". Threads that are important but rarely receive posts are stickied (or, in some software, "pinned"). A sticky thread will always appear in front of normal threads, often in its own section. A "threaded discussion group" is simply any group of individuals who use

885-714: A post. An emoticon , or smiley , is a symbol or combination of symbols used to convey emotional content in written or message form. Forums implement a system through which some of the text representations of emoticons (e.g., xD , :p ) are rendered as a small image. Depending on what part of the world the forum's topic originates from (since most forums are international), smilies can be replaced by other forms of similar graphics; an example would be kaoani (e.g., *(^O^)* , (^-^)b ), or even text between special symbols (e.g., :blink:, :idea:). Most forums implement an opinion poll system for threads. Most implementations allow for single-choice or multi-choice (sometimes limited to

944-416: A section, or even a thread is referred to as a lurker , and the habit is referred to as lurking . Registered members often will refer to themselves as lurking in a particular location, which is to say they have no intention of participating in that section but enjoy reading the contributions to it. The moderators (short singular form: "mod") are users (or employees) of the forum who are granted access to

1003-440: A single-threaded discussion of any given blog post. Slashcode , on the other hand, is far more complicated, allowing fully threaded discussions and incorporating a robust moderation and meta-moderation system as well as many of the profile features available to forum users. Some stand-alone threads on forums have reached fame and notability, such as the " I am lonely will anyone speak to me " thread on MovieCodec.com's forums, which

1062-411: A small bar indicating a post from the user on the ignore list is there. Almost all Internet forums include a member list , which allows the display of all forum members with an integrated search feature. Some forums will not list members with zero posts, even if they have activated their accounts. Many forums allow users to give themselves an avatar . An avatar is an image that appears beside all of

1121-430: A technological evolution of the dial-up bulletin board system (BBS). From a technological standpoint, forums or boards are web applications that manage user-generated content . Early Internet forums could be described as a web version of an electronic mailing list or newsgroup (such as those that exist on Usenet ), allowing people to post messages and comment on other messages. Later developments emulated

1180-611: A thread, eventually ending when everyone gives up or attention spans waver and a more interesting subject takes over. It is not uncommon for debate to end in ad hominem attacks. Several lawsuits have been brought against the forums and moderators, claiming libel and damage. A recent case is the Scubaboard lawsuit, where a business in the Maldives filed a suit against Scubaboard for libel and defamation in January 2010. For

1239-417: A user's posts in order to make the user more recognizable. The user may upload the image to the forum database or provide a link to an image on a separate website. Each forum has limits on the height, width, and data size of avatars that may be used; if the user tries to use an avatar that is too big, it may be scaled down or rejected. Similarly, most forums allow users to define a signature (sometimes called

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1298-459: Is [i]clever[/i] [b] [i]text[/i] [/b] . When the post is viewed, the code is rendered to HTML and will appear as: This is clever text . Many forum packages offer a way to create Custom BBCodes, or BBcodes that are not built into the package, where the administrator of the board can create complex BBCodes to allow the use of JavaScript or iframe functions in posts, for example, embedding a YouTube or Google Video complete with viewer directly into

1357-521: Is a user-submitted message enclosed in a block containing the user's details and the date and time it was submitted. Members are usually allowed to edit or delete their own posts. Posts are contained in threads, where they appear as blocks one after another. The first post starts the thread; this may be called the TS (thread starter) or OP (original post). Posts that follow in the thread are meant to continue discussion about that post or respond to other replies; it

1416-475: Is not uncommon for discussions to be derailed. On Western forums, the classic way to show a member's own details (such as name and avatar) has been on the left side of the post, in a narrow column of fixed width, with the post controls located on the right, at the bottom of the main body, above the signature block. In more recent forum software implementations, the Asian style of displaying the members' details above

1475-491: Is now fully customizable, with "hacks" or "modifications" readily available to customize a person's forum to theirs and their members' needs. Electronic Information Exchange System The Electronic Information Exchange System ( EIES , pronounced eyes ) was an early online conferencing bulletin board system that allowed real-time and asynchronous communication . The system was used to deliver courses, conduct conferencing sessions, and facilitate research. Funded by

1534-674: Is the hashed result of a password that allows one's identity to be recognized without storing any data about the user. In a tripcode system, a secret password is added to the user's name following a separator character (often a number sign ). This password, or tripcode, is hashed into a special key, or trip, distinguishable from the name by HTML styles. Tripcodes cannot be faked, but on some types of forum software, they are insecure and can be guessed. On other types, they can be brute-forced with software designed to search for tripcodes, such as Tripcode Explorer. Moderators and administrators will frequently assign themselves capcodes or tripcodes where

1593-412: Is the size of the files in question). Attachments can be part of a thread, a social group, etc. HyperText Markup Language (HTML) is sometimes allowed, but usually its use is discouraged or, when allowed, extensively filtered. Modern bulletin board systems often have it disabled altogether or allow only administrators to use it, as allowing it at any normal user level is considered a security risk due to

1652-460: Is typically configurable: Options for newest to oldest and for a threaded view (a tree-like view applying logical reply structure before chronological order) can be available. A thread is defined by a title, an additional description that may summarize the intended discussion, and an opening or original post (common abbreviation OP , which can also be used to refer to the original poster ), which opens whatever dialogue or makes whatever announcement

1711-788: The National Science Foundation and developed from 1974-1978 at the New Jersey Institute of Technology (NJIT) by Murray Turoff based on his earlier EMISARI done at the now-defunct Office of Emergency Preparedness , EIES was intended to facilitate group communications that would allow groups to make decisions based on their collective intelligence rather than the lowest common denominator . Initially conceived as an experiment in computer-mediated communication . EIES remained in use for decades because its users "just wouldn't let go" of it, eventually adapting it for legislative, medical and even spiritual uses. In

1770-536: The culture of Toronto and the politics of Toronto and its surrounding areas. While the forum provided large amounts of disorganized information, the site was purchased by Edward Skira and Nada Laskovski in 2008, who then added an editorial section in 2010 to highlight key information. Craig White, whose forum handle is @interchange42, has been the Managing Editor ever since. The website started conducting outreach to development and public relations firms within

1829-516: The posts and threads of all members for the purpose of moderating discussion (similar to arbitration ) and also keeping the forum clean (neutralizing spam and spambots , etc.). Moderators also answer users' concerns about the forum and general questions, as well as respond to specific complaints. Common privileges of moderators include: deleting, merging, moving, and splitting of posts and threads, locking, renaming, and stickying of threads; banning , unbanning, suspending, unsuspending, warning

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1888-536: The BCC or even if one was sent in the first place. Private messages are generally used for personal conversations. They can also be used with tripcodes—a message is addressed to a public trip and can be picked up by typing in the tripcode. An attachment can be almost any file. When someone attaches a file to a person's post, they are uploading that particular file to the forum's server. Forums usually have very strict limits on what can be attached and what cannot (among which

1947-410: The access level of a user or the forum set-up, a posted message might need to be approved by a moderator before it becomes publicly visible. Forums have a specific set of jargon associated with them; for example, a single conversation is called a " thread ", or topic . The name comes from the forums of Ancient Rome. A discussion forum is hierarchical or tree-like in structure; a forum can contain

2006-424: The authority to appoint and revoke members as moderators , manage the rules, create sections and sub-sections, as well as perform any database operations ( database backup , etc.). Administrators often also act as moderators . Administrators may also make forum-wide announcements or change the appearance (known as the skin) of a forum. There are also many forums where administrators share their knowledge. A post

2065-503: The beginning of the 1970s; the EIES system , first operational in 1976; and the KOM system , first operational in 1977. One of the first forum sites (which is still active today) is Delphi Forums, once called Delphi . The service, with four million members, dates to 1983. Forums perform a function similar to that of dial-up bulletin board systems and Usenet networks that were first created in

2124-468: The different newsgroups or individual lists, providing more than one forum dedicated to a particular topic. Internet forums are prevalent in several developed countries . Japan posts the most, with over two million per day on their largest forum, 2channel . China also has millions of posts on forums such as Tianya Club . Some of the first forum systems were the Planet-Forum system, developed at

2183-399: The forum can automatically be promoted to a more privileged user group based on criteria set by the administrator. A person viewing a closed thread as a member will see a box saying he does not have the right to submit messages there, but a moderator will likely see the same box, granting him access to more than just posting messages. An unregistered user of the site is commonly known as

2242-403: The guessable trip is replaced with a special notice (such as "# Administrator") or cap. A personal or private message , or PM for short, is a message sent in private from a member to one or more other members. The ability to send so-called blind carbon copies (BCC) is sometimes available. When sending a BCC, the users to whom the message is sent directly will not be aware of the recipients of

2301-617: The high rate of XSS vulnerabilities. When HTML is disabled, Bulletin Board Code (BBCode) is the most common preferred alternative. BBCode usually consists of a tag, similar to HTML, but instead of < and > , the tagname is enclosed within square brackets (meaning: [ and ] ). Commonly, [i] is used for italic type , [b] is used for bold , [u] for underline , [color="value"] for color, and [list] for lists, as well as [img] for images and [url] for links. The following example BBCode: [b]This[/b]

2360-473: The industry, and also offered third-party advertising. The website functions as a combination of these two streams of information: information provided by members, and information researched and obtained by website staff. The website is now regarded as a public and customer relations tool for developers, as well as a research source for investors. The format of UrbanToronto was transferred to another sister website, SkyriseCities , covering urban development around

2419-515: The late 1970s. Early web-based forums date back as far as 1994, with the WIT project from the W3 Consortium, and starting at this time, many alternatives were created. A sense of virtual community often develops around forums that have regular users. Technology , video games , sports , music , fashion , religion , and politics are popular areas for forum themes, but there are forums for

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2478-477: The members; or adding, editing, and removing the polls of threads. "Junior modding", "backseat modding", or "forum copping" can refer negatively to the behavior of ordinary users who take a moderator-like tone in criticizing other members. Essentially, it is the duty of the moderator to manage the day-to-day affairs of a forum or board as it applies to the stream of user contributions and interactions. The relative effectiveness of this user management directly impacts

2537-465: The mid-1980s, a new version called EIES-2 was developed to research the implementation of group communications in distributed environments, versus the centralized time-sharing environment used for the first version. EIES-2 had an object database architecture using over 2 dozen classes and implementing a notion of activities , which was a standardized interface for implementing nonstandard functions such as polls or list-gathering. The activities concept

2596-415: The most basic, providing text-only postings, to more advanced packages, offering multimedia support and formatting code (usually known as BBCode ). Many packages can be integrated easily into an existing website to allow visitors to post comments on articles. Several other web applications, such as blog software, also incorporate forum features. WordPress comments at the bottom of a blog post allow for

2655-610: The most part, though, forum owners and moderators in the United States are protected by Section 230 of the Communications Decency Act , which states that "[n]o provider or user of an interactive computer service shall be treated as the publisher or speaker of any information provided by another information content provider". In 2019, Facebook was faced with a class action lawsuit set forth by moderators diagnosed with post-traumatic stress disorder . It

2714-562: The places under which members can start their discussions or posts . Logically, forums are organized into a finite set of generic topics (usually with one main topic), driven and updated by a group known as members , and governed by a group known as moderators . It can also have a graph structure. All message boards will use one of three possible display formats. Each of the three basic message board display formats: Non-Threaded/Semi-Threaded/Fully Threaded, has its own advantages and disadvantages. If messages are not related to one another at all,

2773-402: The post has been copied. Posts have an internal limit, usually measured in characters. Often, one is required to have a message with a minimum length of 10 characters. There is always an upper limit, but it is rarely reached – most boards have it at either 10,000, 20,000, 30,000, or 50,000 characters. Most forums keep track of a user's postcount. The postcount is a measurement of how many posts

2832-502: The poster wishes. A thread can contain any number of posts, including multiple posts from the same members, even if they are one after the other. A thread is contained in a forum and may have an associated date that is taken as the date of the last post (options to order threads by other criteria are generally available). When a member posts in a thread, it will jump to the top since it is the latest updated thread. Similarly, other threads will jump in front of it when they receive posts. When

2891-429: The quality of a forum in general, its appeal, and its usefulness as a community of interrelated users. Moderators act as unpaid volunteers on many websites, which has sparked controversies and community tensions. On Reddit , some moderators have prominently expressed dissatisfaction with their unpaid labor being underappreciated, while other site users have accused moderators of abusing special access privileges to act as

2950-403: The recognizability of a poster. They may also allow the user to attach information to all of their posts, such as proclaiming support for a cause, noting facts about themselves, or quoting humorous things that have previously been said on the forum. A subscription is a form of automated notification integrated into the software of most forums. It usually notifies the member either by email or on

3009-580: The service's users. The first soap opera was initiated in 1980 by Martin Nisenholtz . Working groups from different corporations used EIES to collaborate, some working exclusively from home. EIES gave an early glimpse of the challenges of work–life balance and pointed the way toward hypertext and gamification . Notable users included Alvin Toffler , Peter & Trudy Johnson-Lenz, Barry Wellman , and Whole Earth editor-in-chief Stewart Brand , who

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3068-500: The site when the member returns. The option to subscribe is available for every thread while logged in. Subscriptions work with read marking , namely the property of unread , which is given to the content never served to the user by the software. Recent developments in some popular implementations of forum software have brought social network features and functionality . Such features include personal galleries and pages, as well as social networks like chat systems. Most forum software

3127-417: The topic is controversial. Poor understanding of the differences in values among the participants is a common problem on forums. Because replies to a topic are often worded to target someone's point of view, discussion will usually go slightly off in several directions as people question each other's validity, sources, and so on. Circular discussion and ambiguity in replies can extend for several tens of posts in

3186-426: The world. UrbanToronto's format has been copied for various Australian cities (originally just Melbourne ). Internet forum An Internet forum , or message board , is an online discussion site where people can hold conversations in the form of posted messages. They differ from chat rooms in that messages are often longer than one line of text, and are at least temporarily archived. Also, depending on

3245-423: Was described as the "web's top hangout for lonely folk" by Wired magazine . A forum consists of a tree-like directory structure. The top end is "Categories". A forum can be divided into categories for the relevant discussions. Under the categories are sub-forums, and these sub-forums can further have more sub-forums. The topics (commonly called threads ) come under the lowest level of sub-forums, and these are

3304-495: Was influenced by EIES to develop The WELL . At its peak EIES had more than 2000 subscribers from various government agencies, large corporations and educational institutions. The Western Behavioral Sciences Institute ran a private conference called the School of Management and Strategic Studies , of which Harlan Cleveland was a member, and starting in 1985, Connected Education offered the first completely online masters degree on

3363-549: Was one of the earliest instances of groupware , if not the earliest, and some users contend it is where the term was coined. The editors of the Whole Earth Software Catalog set up a private conference on EIES where they could collaborate on software reviews from around the US. Along with serious research, there were diversions like the "EIES Soap Opera", which was a series of stories written collaboratively by

3422-410: Was settled for $ 52 million the following year. By default, to be an Internet forum, the web application needs the ability to submit threads and replies. Typically, threads are in a newer to older view, and replies are in an older to newer view. Most imageboards and 2channel-style discussion boards allow (and encourage) anonymous posting and use a system of tripcodes instead of registration. A tripcode

3481-535: Was similar to what would be done in today's message board applications using plug-ins . The standard message-based functions were also implemented as activities. EIES-2 ran on Unix and was written in the programming languages C and Smalltalk . EIES-2 used the X.400 database standards. Accounts were available to the public for a monthly fee of USD $ 75 plus connect-time charges. In his book The Virtual Community , Howard Rheingold called EIES "the lively great-great-grandmother of all virtual communities". EIES

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