What is a bulletin board/forum?

A bulletin board/forum is an online discussion site. It's sometimes also called a 'board' or 'forums'. It may contain several categories, consisting of forums, threads and individual posts.

How is all this structured?

The bulletin board/forum as a whole contains various categories (broad subject areas), which themselves contain forums (more specific subject areas) which contain threads (conversations on a topic) which are made up of individual posts (where a user writes something).

The board home page has a list of categories and forums, with basic statistics for each - including the number of threads and posts, and which member posted the most recent message.

How do I find my way around?

When you click on a forum's name, you are taken to the list of threads it contains. A thread is a conversation between members. Each thread starts out as a single post and grows as more individual posts are added by different users. Threads can be rated to show how useful or popular they are and may contain polls.

To start a new thread simply click on the 'New Topic' button (you may need the right permissions to do this, all members have this permission).

Threads can be ordered in many different ways. The default is to have the thread with the most recent activity at the top.

Multi-page views

When there are more threads to display than will fit on a single page, you may see the 'Page' box, which contains page numbers. This indicates that the list of threads has been split over two or more pages.

This method of splitting lists of items over many pages is used throughout the board/forum.