Review of Related Literature History of Forums In the past, forums were viewed as places for geeks to communicate via the web. However, as the internet continues to grow and define itself, we have found them to be a very valuable resource of information. Forums benefit your internet experience twofold. Forums date from around 1995 and perform a similar function to the dial-up bulletin boards and internet newsgroups that were popular in the 80’s and 90’s. It gives you a sense of virtual community that develops from the regular users.
Forums have also been referred to as bulletin boards, discussion boards, message boards, discussion forums and web forums. Tech Support Guy Back in 1996, a 14-year old Mike Cermakk started his website called “Tech Support Guy”. The site started as a humble set of a dozen or so common computer problem solutions. That time, the Internet was still relatively new to most people, and Tech Support Guy was one of the first sites to offer free computer support. Ever since that day, Tech Support Guy is widely regarded as one of the best free computer support forum sites. http://www. echguy. org/history. html Why Open University uses online forums. Online forums can make a big difference by making you feel part of the OU community, connecting to other students and keeping you motivated. It’s a help to know that other people are struggling with the same issues as you, and that you can share problems and ideas at any time of day or night It is a good way for students to work together, rather than individually. Group working is becoming an important element of many courses, partly because it is increasingly the way the workplace is organised.
Employers look for evidence of group working skills. In learning, group working tends to promote deeper understanding of a subject and better critical thinking. Online forums are a different way of learning from face-to-face methods, and people need to learn how to do it successfully. For example, there are much longer time delays in a discussion, and you might miss non-verbal cues such as tone of voice or facial expression. Some differences are positive: you have more time to think about what you want to say.
Some are a nuisance: it’s possible to misinterpret people’s written words. http://www. open. ac. uk/pc4study/communicating 4chan 4chan is a simple image-based bulletin board where anyone can post comments and share images. 4chan’s collaborative-community format is copied from one of the most popular forums in Japan, Futaba Channel. Different boards are dedicated to different topics, from Technology, Japanese anime, manga, and culture to videogames, music, and photography. Users do not need to register a username before participating in the community. ttp://www. 4chan. org/ The Student Room Forums The Student Room (or TSR as it is affectionately known) is a thriving free student discussion forum and is the world’s largest and fastest growing student community, with over 470,000 members and more than 25,000,000 posts on the forum. The site welcomes people from any stage of education. They also have the TSR wiki which has thousands of pages of revision notes, hundreds of sample UCAS personal statements and articles on everything from gap years to coping with long distance relationships.
You can read and post messages in any of the forums free of charge. http://www. thestudentroom. co. uk/ Many forum softwares are now available for free! 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 the most basic, providing text-only postings, to more advanced packages, offering multimedia support and formatting code (usually known as BBCode).
Many packages such as SMF, Weebly, FreeForums, Fireboard for Joomla and phpBB3 can be integrated easily into an existing website to allow visitors to post comments on articles. DaniWeb IT discussion community When founder Dani Horowitz started the DaniWeb. com online community in 2005 as a hobby project during her Junior year of college, she never imagined it would turn into the authority IT publication it is today. With true dedication and passion, DaniWeb® LLC turned into a fulltime business in 2006 upon Dani’s college graduation, and moved from a home office into professional office space in January 2009.
Today, DaniWeb is an IT Discussion community which, at only four years old, has developed into a thriving online community of over 750,000 IT professionals and over a million forum posts, sees an average of nearly 8 million pageviews monthly, and is growing at the rate of nearly 1000 new members daily. DaniWeb provides a one-stop solution for developers, tech enthusiasts, corporate professionals, and novices on virtually every IT topic imaginable. http://www. daniweb. com/
