Knowledge Is Power

To join a forum, registering to a forum must be done.  To do this, click on the “Join [name of forum] Forums” link, and the Registration Agreement will be displayed for the visitor to read and accept before continuing with the registration process.  Upon acceptance of the terms, the visitor will be required to complete a form, which requests for information such as full name, username, email address, password, location and other miscellaneous information about the user.  When all required fields (marked with an asterisk) have been provided, the visitor can proceed by clicking the “Join [name of forum] Forums” link at the bottom of the forum.

FuseTalk refers to pre-defined types of users.  They are Forum Owner, Moderator, and User.

Forum Owners are individuals who have been assigned to manage a forum.  Forum owners have the rights to change any forum level, create discussion categories for their forum, create moderators, and manage their own sets of users.

Moderators are individuals who have been assigned to moderate a category within a forum.  A moderator can be assigned to one or multiple categories and their permissions range from deleting messages/topics to banning individuals from accessing the forum.

Users are individuals or members who have been given access to a forum or who have publicly registered to access the forum.  These members do not have any special privileges unless otherwise given by the Forum Owner.  Users can become Moderators or Forum Owners if designated by the Forum Owner.

A forum consists of 4 components: the forum itself, its categories, the topics and the messages.  Each component, or level of hierarchy, is illustrated in the diagram below.

Each forum can have an unlimited number of categories and sub-categories.  Categories are like placeholders in which topics of discussion and messages are contained.  Henceforth, a category manages the forum’s topics into folders or groupings.  This is a logical method of sorting topics.  On the home page of the forum, a listing of all the categories to which the user has access, excluding those categories that the user wishes to block from viewing (refer to “How do I update my profile?”), will be displayed.  In addition, the user will see the number of topics posted within each corresponding category, and the date/time/author of the last posting made in the corresponding category.  To find out quickly if new messages have been posted since the last viewing, simply hover over the clipboard icon corresponding to the category in question.

There are so many different names for a “forum”.  Some think of them as message boards or bulletin boards.  Some call them threaded discussions, discussion boards or discussion groups while others call them conferences.  FuseTalk simply calls them forums.

Deciding if just one forum or multiple forums is needed can be difficult, especially if there is an uncertainty of how they are defined and what makes a forum.

The simplistic definition of a forum is a place where people have the ability to start communication (in the form of threads) and reply to other people's threads.  A member of the community in the forum posts a message, which is visible to everyone in that community.  Once read, there is the option to post a reply, which can also be visible to the community.  Thus, a discussion can build up without all users having to be online at the same time.  

FuseTalk can allow for more than one forum to be created.  These forums can be considered as containers for threads started by the community.  Depending on the permissions of community members as defined by the forum administrator, they can post replies to existing threads and start new threads as they wish.  In addition, users of a forum can post anonymously (if this is enabled by the Forum Administrator) or as their registered username.