A forum is an outlet for opinions expressed as a discussion or question and answers. The opinions or Q&A are crowdsourced from an audience involved with the subject matter, often membership of the community.
How is a forum different from other applications?
All of a forum's content is crowdsourced. This is different from a blog, which is authored by one individual or more individuals named in the blog setup. It's different from a wiki in that a wiki page's author is a permissioned author. (Wikis also have a versioning feature that forums don't have.) A gallery has nearly unlimited media space, limited only by the setup of the community. Like galleries, forums have RSS.
A Telligent forum has 2 features that aren't in any other application:
- "I have this question too." This feature on a forum thread question has a counter which increases whenever someone checks the "I have this question too" check box; checking this check box triggers a voting arrow displaying the number of people who've clicked this item;
- "This helped me." A community member can vote that the question's answer was also helpful to him or her with this check box, and it will contribute to the verified answer count.
- Suggested answer/verified answer. The author of a reply can click Suggest as answer, which turns the thread header yellow. If the answer is verified, the header turns green. (However the answered status can be changed.)
Like most forums, Telligent forums are organized by threads.
How do I create a forum?
Please follow the instructions on the What is an application? article.