What is a forum?

An Internet forum is an online discussion site where guests can have conversations in the form of posted messages. They differ from chat rooms in that messages are often longer than one line of text, and are at least temporarily archived. On most forums, users do not have to log in to read existing messages. The modern forum originated from bulletin boards, and so-called computer conferencing systems, and are a technological evolution of the dialup bulletin board system. From a technological point of view, forums are web applications managing user-generated content.