Forums, messageboards and discussion groups

A screenshot of a web forum.

Forums, messageboards and discussion groups are web-based tools for managing conversations across different topics.

Like newsgroups they allow people to post and reply to messages, often in a threaded fashion where the replies to a particular message can be viewed as an ongoing discussion.

Forums grew out of the bulletin boards and newsgroups that existed on the internet and other networks before the creation of the world-wide-web.

Today there are hundreds of thousands of forums around the world, with billions of messages posted by their members.