Forums

Sometimes called a bulletin board or newsgroup, a forum is a place where people can post questions or statements and get answers or discussion from any of the other users in the system. Originally based on mailing lists and then Usenet, forums have been developed a lot recently and tools like Yahoo Groups and Google Groups have added in diary, file sharing, user profiles etc. to make them much richer collaborative environments. Forum functionality is also now built into sites like LinkedIn, Google Plus, and Facebook. Our forum was the first tool we put in at the BBC which eventually grew to around 25,000 users and despite being less glamorous than some of the more modern tools is still a great engine on which to build your ecology of tools.