discussion board
Discussion forums or Internet forums are topic-related public discussion groups that do not take place in real time, but are asynchronous and time-delayed. In contrast, chats in chat rooms are in real time. On the World Wide Web(WWW) and Usenet, we generally refer to newsgroups, of which there are thousands, several hundred on some topics.
Each discussion forum can have several discussion threads, the threads, at the same time. The discussions within a discussion forum run according to a question and answer system in which every Internet user can participate. Through postings, interested parties can contribute their own comments to the discussion topic. Likewise, every Internet user can inform himself about the discussion status. The best-known Internet forum is Usenet, others are news groups, which are accessed via the newsreader, and mailing lists, which are based on the principle of distribution lists.
The approximately 100,000 discussion forums on the Internet are thematically structured and organized into several main groups (Mainstream Hierarchies) and subgroups (Alternative Hierarchies). The thematically organized major groups include news, comp, sci, soc, rec, misc, and alt, which are often still tagged with the country domain.
The newsgroups of the main news groups are maintained by all news servers, the news subgroups are optional and not fully represented on every news server. All other news groups are regional in nature and are not maintained on a global basis.
Many of the regional discussion forums are also maintained in the local language. German language news groups are for example "de.sci.medizin" or "de.soc.politik".