Web Forum / Bulletin Board / Community

A help desk is focused on providing one-on-one support. A forum is designed to allow forum members to help each other because questions can be answered by any forum member. Over time, forum questions and answers can become a valuable knowledgebase. A forum may also be referred to as a bulletin board, message board or community.

Key potential benefits of a forum include shifting some of the support burden away from your business and adding more dynamic content to keep visitors coming back to your website. However, a potential downside is that forums must be carefully monitored to ensure that visitors are not being subjected to any malicious and inaccurate posts or security threats.

Considerations

• Abuse

  In order to minimize administration time and ensure a pleasant visit for your guests, it is key to scrutinize the anti-abuse capabilities of a solution.

• Bad Advice

  Bad advice can reflect negatively on your forum and can be difficult to police if you expect a large volume. Ratings of posts by other members can help counter bad advice.

• Forum Activity

  A forum without activity can appear like a ghost town and reduce your credibility so be sure there will be demand. If you don't anticipate an active forum or you don't have the time to administer it, consider a blog, wiki or a frequently asked questions (FAQs) section instead.

• Search Engine Friendly

  If you have a relevant forum that is accessible by search engines, it can serve to boost the search rankings.

Features

• Discussion Threads

  A thread is the discussion posts that results from the initial question or comment post.

• Ratings

  In order to give visitors some indication of information quality, most applications include the ability to rate postings and display information about the member that created a post.

• Instant Messaging

  In addition to posting simple messages, some forums also include instant messaging.

• Polls

  Provide simple polls to gauge user sentiment.

• Calendars

  Calendar of events

• Security

  It is possible to assign different permissions to groups.

Implementation Options